Communists' Capitalist~I by E. J. Kahn October 10, 1977 PROFILE of industrialist Cyrus Stephen Eaton, who at nearly 94, is the oldest member of the board of trustees of the University of Chicago. Eaton, who was born in Pugwash, Nova Scotia, and graduated from McMaster University in 1905, has been, since the 1950's, a controversial proponent of coexistence with the Communist countries. A believer in capitalism (he has made his living in "generally speaking, rubber, steel, electricity, and finance"), Eaton's interest in the Soviet Union was whetted by his friendship with Samuel Harper, who eventually became the head of the Russian-language department of the Univ. of Chicago. Beginning in 1955, Eaton frequently played host to visiting Russians. He also maintained an intimate friendship with Nikita Khrushchev. Eaton is one of the few Western holders of the Lenin Peace Prize, which he received on July 1, 1960. Tells about how Eaton's informal gatherings of scientists evolved into the yearly Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs. Eaton has frequently criticized the FBI and the CIA for unwarranted invasion of privacy. He has, however, little use for American student radicals. Today Eaton is chairman emeritus of the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway & has an office on the 36th floor of the Terminal Tower in Cleveland, from which for 20 years he had almost literally loomed over that town. (Access the entire article) or read below.1COMMUNISTS' CAPITALISTBy E. J. Kahn, Jr.(Copyright the New Yorker Magazine,October 10 and October 17, 1977 issues)THEY are all gone now—Bertrand Russell, Samuel Insull, John L.Lewis, the Duke of Windsor, Nikita Khrushchev, and Frank Lindsay.Frank Lindsay was, in 1968, at the age of a hundred, the oldest livingtrustee of the University of Chicago. That he—let alone five fellowboard members of eighty-five or older—was still around nine years agowas somewhat vexing to another venerable trustee, Cyrus StephenEaton, who was then eighty-four, and who remarked in a letter at thetime, “My great ambition to be the oldest member of the Chicago boardappears hopeless.” Now, at nearly ninety-four, Eaton has achieved thatgoal, which might have pleased another of his assorted oldacquaintances—John D. Rockefeller, Sr., who founded the University ofChicago in 1890, and who, hack in 1901, introduced Eaton to the worldof high finance. Eaton came to occupy a position of eminence in thatworld, and among those who have suffered more than he has from itsinequities he has often been called a capitalistic robber baron, or worse.For the last couple of decades, he has also often been called aCommunistic traitor, or worse. Eaton, who thinks that the seniorRockefeller was just about the finest American of his era, was for fortyyears further vexed because, following his designation, in 1936, as oneof the hundred-odd electors of the Hall of Fame, it took him that long toget yet another of his heroes, Andrew Carnegie, admitted there.(Carnegie hasn't yet been enshrined; the Hall has run out of money.) Onthe pedestals of Eaton's own private pantheon are also to be found such2other members of his wide-ranging social set as Fidel Castro, LeonidBrezhnev, Pham Van Dong, and whoever has happened in recent yearsto be in charge of Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Rumania,Yugoslavia, and East Germany. One of the few Western holders of theLenin (ne Stalin) Peace Prize, and a never-say-die aspirant to the Nobel,Eaton, who was born in Pugwash, Nova Scotia, and graduated in 1905from McMaster University, then in Toronto and now in Hamilton, Ontario,has nine honorary degrees—from McMaster; from Dalhousie andAcadia Universities, in Nova Scotia; from Mount Allison University, inNew Brunswick; from Bard and Bowling Green, in the United States;from the University of Sofia, in Bulgaria; from Eotvos LorandUniversity, in Budapest; and from Charles University, in Prague. Whenhe attended the 1973 enthronement of his old mentor's great-grandsonJohn D. Rockefeller IV as president of West Virginia Wesleyan College,the official program listed him as representing Charles University. Thatinstitution refers to him honorifically as “Cyrusovi StephenoviEatonovi.”Eaton, who expects to live to be at least a hundred (the elderRockefeller departed several weeks short of ninety-nine), has said thathis father, who died at eighty-four, missed some of the most satisfyingand stimulating years of man's span. Eaton, who has chaired enoughboards in his career to build a corporate raft, was seventy when hestarted in as chairman of the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway in 1954,replacing his friend and ally Robert R. Young on Young's departure toengage in a bloody and successful battle for control of the New YorkCentral. On the eve of Eaton's ninetieth birthday, instead of beingceremonially invested with some kind of honorary C. & O. degree on hisretirement, he was summarily booted upstairs to chairman emeritus byhis own board of directors at a rump meeting. When his son Cyrus, Jr.,3who was also a C. & O. director, bridled it the indelicate treatment hisfather had received, he was booted off the board altogether. Eaton perewas stripped of all but one of his twelve assistants but was allowed tokeep his office, on the thirty-sixth floor of the Terminal Tower inCleveland, from which for twenty years he had almost literally loomedover that town The office, to which Eaton has repaired with diminishingfrequency since he turned ninety-two, is a large, emphatically capitalisticsanctum, with the exception that The New Republic and Soviet Union arejust as prominently on display as Forbes and Fortune. The chair Eatonsits in is unabashedly red—though of a high-quality leather. When he isnot scrutinizing the latest Dow-Jones figures on the companies in whichhe owns stock, or gazing out of a window at the iron-ore freightersinching their way up the Cuyahoga River from Lake Erie toward one ofa number of steel mills in which he has at one time or another had aproprietary interest (“There's the strength of America,” he tells visitors),he can glance at one of six paintings that grace his oak-paneled walls.(The paneling was imported from Sherwood Forest by the notorious VanSweringen brothers, who jointly occupied the chamber when they werepresiding over their railroad empire.) All the paintings are gifts fromCommunist dignitaries. Over Eaton's fireplace hangs a landscape thatwas presented to him by Nikita Khrushchev. There are canvases fromCzechoslovakia, Hungary (a reader of the Cleveland Plain Dealercomplained because the paper chanced to run a photograph of Eatonreceiving this one on George Washington's birthday), Rumania, Poland,and Bulgaria. The Bulgarian work shows two young boys transporting awater barrel in a wagon. Spotting it while lunching in Sofia with thehead of the local Communist Party, Eaton said that it reminded him ofhis boyhood in Canada. He was at once offered it as a keepsake. “I stillhave wall space for China and Cuba,” he likes to say.4From the Terminal Tower it is a short walk to the Union Club,Cleveland's upper-crust and conservative social oasis. (One president ofthe club was reportedly dropped from its rolls in the early nine teenhundredswhen it became known that he had voted for a Democrat.)Eaton has been a member since 1913, and over the last twenty years hehas invited so many Communist leaders to the club that some of its flockhave groused that it might better be called the Soviet Union Club. Oneof his more memorable gatherings there was a lunch he gave in January,1959, for Anastas I. Mikoyan, First Deputy Premier of the Soviet Union,who was visiting the United States to feel out public reaction inanticipation of the tour contemplated later that year by PremierKhrushchev. Most of Eaton's other guests were Midwesternindustrialists, in steel or railroads or utilities or the like. Outside the club,a few anti-Communist pickets were arrayed, armed with rocks, eggs, andspittle, but inside Mikoyan got a standing ovation when Eatonintroduced him. The Russian said, “The problem of peace now is moreimportant than ever before in the history of mankind. And that is whywe highly value the contributions being made by Mr. Cyrus Eaton intrying to bring together on a platform of peace and cooperation thescientists and also the businessmen of our countries.” Eaton, Mikoyanwent on, “has become more popular in our country than any capitalisthas ever been before.” He said that the speeches Eaton made followingvisits to Russia were regularly “published in full in our papers, andthey said, ‘This is not a normal capitalist.'” Mikoyan also told theassemblage that while in America he hoped to purchase, on behalf of hiscountry, huge amounts of steel to be used in constructing pipelines fornatural gas and oil. “I remember well the Deputy Premier's saying thathe wanted to place the biggest order for steel in the history of theworld,” Eaton recalled recently. “He said that none of it would be usedfor military purposes, and that he wasn't going to ask for credit, either.5'There will be cash in a New York bank before a single shipment leaves,'Mikoyan promised. The businessmen were naturally enchanted with theprospect, and after lunch they clustered around the Deputy Premier todiscuss quantities and specifications. Mikoyan himself, when he and Iadjourned to my home afterward, said it had been the happiest day of hislife. Then he went to Washington to obtain the necessary export permits,and he was brushed off by Lewis Strauss at Commerce and by DouglasDillon at State. So Mikoyan shrugged and went to Europe and placedhis orders with French and Dutch and British and Belgian and Germanfirms, and the orders were so big they kept the mills there running fulltilt for three years. Strauss had not yet been confirmed as Secretary ofCommerce by the Senate, and I was pleased to be able to help block himwhen he did come up. He told Mikoyan, 'We won't do business withyou, because you don't believe in God,' and gave him a copy of GeorgeWashington's farewell address to his officers—the one in which, youwill recall, Washington said, 'Reason and experience both forbid us toexpect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religiousprinciple.’ Hardly tactful, to say the least. Mikoyan gave Strauss somevodka and caviar, unaccompanied by any land of homily.”ALTHOUGH Eaton has twice been dropped from the SocialRegister for various alleged sins of commission or omission, there hasnever been any formal attempt to revoke his membership in the UnionClub, a fate from which he may have helped save himself by alsoentertaining there such acceptable types as the Duke of Windsor, whowas more of a novelty in Cleveland that he would have been in, say.Palm Beach or Newport. “The Duke had a beautiful voice and charmingmanners, and he got along famously with the business people Iinvited to meet him,” Eaton says. “I had some fine letters from himafterward, and once I showed some of them to his niece Princess6Margaret, and she said that she and her sister considered that their unclehad had an unhappy time of it, and that they were very grateful toanyone, like me, who had befriended him. I never knew the Duke'sgreat-grandmother personally, but I well recall Queen Victoria'sDiamond Jubilee, in the spring of 1897, at Halifax. In Her Majesty'shonor, there were some splendid reenactments of the Crimean War—Iparticularly enjoyed the charge of the Light Brigade—and rowing racesamong the crews of ships in port from Norway, Sweden, Denmark, andHolland, and a baseball game between a local team and some visitingrailroad men. I was only thirteen in 1897, unfortunately, and thus tooyoung to play. Not long after that, of course, came the Boer War, andhad I been a little bit older I'd have enlisted, like some of my relatives.Lord Strathcona, then the Canadian High Commissioner in London,organized and equipped his own cavalry, and when the Strathcona Horsecame through from the west en route to embarkation from Halifax, ourschool went down to the railroad station to salute them, and I wore ashoulder sash with the unit's colors on it. I have always felt that if theUnited States had studied the lessons of the Boer War more closely itmight have avoided its mistakes in Vietnam.”Cleveland has long had, and to a degree still has, mixed feelingsabout Eaton. He set up shop there to show the big-money boys in bigcityNew York that there could be other seats of power. Wall Streetmanaged to cope with him fairly well, but along Cleveland's EuclidAvenue during the Cold War he was viewed with consternation and,more often than not, disapprobation. When, in 1962, the magazinePageant ranked him eighth in a list of the ten most controversial Americans,the Plain Dealer deplored this as a grave miscarriage of justice,arguing that Eaton, rather than Jimmy Hoffa, should have been placedfirst. Because of Eaton's practically non-stop controversiality, so much7garbage kept being dumped on the lawns of his suburban estate, AcadiaFarms—an eight-hundred-acre retreat in Northfield, twenty milessoutheast of Cleveland— that sanitation trucks had to make extra runs tohaul the stuff away, and his grandchildren were taunted by theirschoolmates as “Reds” and “Commies.”Eaton's second wife, Anne, whom he married in 1957, when hewas seventy-three and she thirty-five, was— like his first wife, three ofhis daughters, a daughter-in-law, and his principal office assistant—analumna of Hathaway Brown, the Cleveland school for young ladies offashion. The more outspokenly Eaton carried on about Communists andthe desirability— nay, necessity—of getting along with them, the lessother H.B. alumnae would speak to his wife. Mrs. Eaton was unfazed atno longer being asked to certain teas; anyway, she was usually too busybeing a political hostess to accept invitations of a purely social nature. “Isuppose I've had more Communists to dinner than any other woman inthe Western Hemisphere,” she said not long ago, and, indeed, she oncedid feed the entire Bolshoi Ballet. By 1970, though, she was sufficientlyback in the good graces of Hathaway Brown to be asked to give thecommencement address. Her husband thereupon favored that academywith an Eaton Seminar Room, where healthy debate has presumablysince flourished.The Plain Dealer used to run anti-Eaton editorials about asregularly as it denounced organized crime and inveighed againstdrought. The editorials could be quickly skimmed, because their titlesconveyed their gist: “Apostle of Appeasement,” or “Now See Here, Mr.Eaton.” Musing editorially in 1960 upon whether or not it should applaudEaton's receiving the Lenin Peace Prize—the only other Americanrecipients of which were Paul Robeson, Howard Fast, William E. B. Du8Bois, and Andrew W. Moulton, the left-wing Protestant Episcopalbishop of Utah— the Plain Dealer concluded, “We hope he willunderstand why we find it necessary to wait and see,” and one Eaton-Khrushchev tete-a-tete inspired the tart observation “Eaton's fellow-Clevelanders can only wonder, with shame, why their fellow-townsmanshould be so intimate with his country's most dangerous enemy.” Overthe years, furthermore, the paper has carried dozens of letters suggestingthat if Eaton likes Russia so much, why doesn't he move there? Eatonsays that he once had a business associate interview the writers of adozen such letters, and that the investigation revealed that “withoutexception” the missives had been composed not by their alleged sendersbut by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. (The F.B.I, has notacknowledged authorship.) Lately, though, Cleveland has begun tomellow toward the person who could be called its enfant terrible werehe not so terribly old. However the Plain Dealer may have viewed himin the past, the Cleveland Press Club named him its Man of the Year in1967, asserting as it did so (alas! poor Bob Feller) that “history mayjudge Cyrus Eaton the most noted figure of all time in Cleveland.” Whenthe man who had by then been judged far and wide to be the father ofdetente celebrated his ninetieth birthday, on December 27, 1973, themayor threw a reception for him at City Hall. The Rumanian Ambassadorto the United States flew in from Washington, and a cablegramwas read from Leonid Brezhnev, Alexei Kosygin, and Nikolai V.Podgorny, stating, without qualification, “Everyone in the Soviet Unionloves you.” Cleveland's mayor, for his part, presented Eaton with a keyto the city, which the proud recipient has exhibited ever since in hislibrary, along with similar municipal gate-openers from San Francisco,Moscow, and Bridgewater, Nova Scotia. The Russian key is the fanciest:it has a built-in clock.9In still another editorial, the Plain Dealer said, “It would be verypleasant to live in the world of Cyrus Eaton, with caviar in every pot andtwo troikas in every garage, but we fear this world exists only in CyrusEaton's imagination.” Not exactly. Eaton has long been able to afford allthe caviar he desires, though it does not fit in with the bland diet he hasadopted, and since 1959 he has had in his garage—his stable, moreprecisely—at Acadia Farms the only authentic Russian troika in theUnited States. His troika—three stallions, a carriage, and a sleigh— wasalso a gift from Premier Khrushchev, who shipped it to Ohio,accompanied by a trainer and a veterinarian, in 1958. The troika wasformally conveyed to Eaton by First Deputy Premier Mikoyan during his1959 winter visit Eaton and his wife climbed into their new two-seatersleigh, with the Russian trainer at the reins Mikoyan hopped onto anarrow running board, clung gamely to one side of the vehicle as the bighorses—stalwart Orloffsky-Rissaky stallions—careered along at theircustomary twenty-mile-an-hour speed, and managed not to fall off. “Mr.Mikoyan is the bravest man I ever heard of,” Mrs. Eaton saidafterward. In the ensuing years, as the original three horses have agedand died, successive Soviet governments have sent over replacements.Lately, Eaton has been breeding his Russian stallions, noted forendurance as well as speed, to American quarter-horse mares, and hehopes to end up with a fine new breed of his own invention. The troikahas also been put through its paces at agricultural shows and stockshows and other gatherings around the country. At Acadia Farms, theEaton troika has jounced and jostled such eminent guests as the Nobellaureates Lord John Boyd Orr and Sir Norman Angell and thephotographer Karsh, who stopped by one day in 1963 to snap somevisiting luminaries and presently was snapped himself in spirited transit.Physically, Eaton is the epitome of a capitalist—almost a caricature ofone. He is tall, robust, silver-haired, blue-eyed, ruddy-cheeked, and10always impeccably dressed. His day-in-and-day-out costume, evenwhen down on the farm, consists of a well-cut (Wetzel) doublebreasteddark-blue serge suit, with a white shirt, a gray silk four-in-hand,and highly polished black shoes. On weekends, until he gave it up, atninety-two, he was fond of riding, and he was partial to the full regaliaworn when riding to hounds. (He quit skiing at eighty-seven and icehockey at seventy.) However he may be dressed, this prince of paradoxdoes not see himself as a freak, or even as an anomaly. Bertrand Russellonce said that Eaton was living proof that business and philosophy couldmix, and this characterization struck its beneficiary as quite apposite.Asked once in a courtroom—there has been much litigation in hiscareer— what he did for a living, Eaton replied, “Generally speaking,rubber, steel, electricity, and finance.” On other occasions, he hasdescribed himself as a simple farmer. Such modesty is unusual for him.When he is travelling, he sometimes has an assistant phone the localpapers to reveal that he is in town and available for interviews, “Nocomment” is a phrase he hardly ever uses. Eaton's remarks to the presssince he has become somebody quotable have been voluminous, and thatdoesn't include the thousand or so letters to the editor that he has dashedoff, on topics ranging from the condition of Washington, D.C., in 1942(“a megalosaurian city, its body all out of proportion to its brain”) to thefiscal plight of New York City in 1975 (“I have been personallyinvolved in every American panic since 1893”). More often than not, hisletters have revealed him as the foremost living champion of coexistence,a role his wife likes to complement; her favorite winter costume isan American mink coat topped by a sable hat from Russia. WheneverEaton is accused, as he has been in so many letters to editors, of beingpartial to Communism, he retorts, in no uncertain terms, that he is notand never has been anything but an outright capitalist. “With my record,I find the notion that I might be a Communist rather astonishing,” he11declared in 1961. The only American Communist he is aware of everhaving met is Gus Hall, the general secretary of the indigenous Party, towhom he was introduced at an official Czechoslovakian reception inNew York some years back. But then Eaton docs not believe he couldhave met many others. “There are no Communists in America to speakof except in the minds of those on the payroll of the F.B.I.,” he said inthe spring of 1958. It delights him to be able to bring persons heunquestioningly identifies as Communists into his familiar capitalisticorbit. The parent company of the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway owns theelegant Greenbrier Hotel, in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia-“The Greenbrier makes a favorable impression on Communists, becauseit's probably the most capitalistic spot in America” Eaton says. He andhis wife once took Soviet Ambassador Mikhail Menshikov and his wifeto the hotel for a posh weekend. At dinner, hearty coexistential toastswere exchanged, first to capitalism and then to Communism, Mrs. Eatonthereupon impishly proposed a further toast—to all the people on earthwho believed in neither. After a moment's hesitation, everybody presentjoined in that one, too.WHEN Eaton was sixteen and attending Amherst Academy, inNova Scotia, he was awarded for scholastic achievement sets of thecomplete works of Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley. Darwin,Huxley, and other rationalists have been his heroes ever since, and hetends to identify his own triumphs and travails with theirs. Eaton, thoughnever ordained, was briefly, in his youth, the pastor of a Baptist church;like other lapsed preachers, he has been attracted to philosophers— KarlMarx among them—who had little use for organized religion. Alongwith Wall Street financiers, the popularizers of myths and superstitionshave long been his foes. A contemporary whom he greatly admired wasthe late A. Eustace Haydon, himself a lapsed Baptist and for many years12a professor of comparative religion at Chicago, whose 1941 book,“Biography of the Gods,” was dedicated to Eaton. The dedicatee likes toavow his concurrence with the author's conclusion:More important than faith in God is devotion to the human idealsof which he has become the symbol. Too long the strong; gods havebeen made to bear the burden- Wistfully man has watched for the day ofdivine action to dawn and ever healed the hurt of disappointment withmore passionate faith. Hopes hung in the heavens are of no avail. Whatthe gods have been expected to do, and have failed to do through theages, man must find the courage and intelligence to do for himself. Moreneedful than faith in God is faith that man can give love, justice, peace,and all his beloved moral values embodiment in human relations. Denialof this faith is the only real atheism. Without it, belief in all the galaxiesof gods is mere futility. With it, and the practice that flows from it, manneed not mourn the passing of the gods.In sharp contrast to many of his associates in the financial world,Eaton has habitually elected to spend his leisure time far removed fromhis business cronies. “On my vacations, for my companions I used toinvite the presidents of universities and other scholars to visit me inNova Scotia,” he says. (He has a three-thousand-acre summer estatethere, near Halifax.) “I found pleasure in talking to thinkers, for achange. I would sometimes take them on salmon-fishing expeditions,maybe half a dozen college presidents at a clip, casting in the daytimeand in the evening discussing the best way of getting people interestedin great books. Most of them were pretty good fishermen; it's not toostrenuous a sport. Many of my industrialist friends believed I was doinga wise thing in seeking to find recreation in contemplating intellectualmatters. But I also encouraged reading of great books—in someinstances successfully, I like to think—by people in the business world.13I kept urging my friends there not to accept as the truth something thatwas merely popular but, rather, to question the finality and truth of allour dogmas, whether in religion or politics or economics.”In the nineteen-fifties, Eaton began to formalize his penchant byinviting— in collaboration with the Association of American Colleges--academics to a series of what were called Intellectual Life conferences,during which they would alternately play tennis or golf and explorePlato's “Crito” or “Gullivers Travels.” At the end of 1954, on theoccasion of his seventy-first birthday, Eaton announced that he wasturning his family's hundred-and-fifty-year-old home in Pugwash into apermanent site for meetings of thinkers. The following year, BertrandRussell and Albert Einstein, increasingly perturbed about theproliferation of nuclear weapons, resolved to call a conference ofscientists who, acting as individuals rather than representing nations orgovernments, could attempt to save the world from nuclear holocaust.One idea at the start was to hold a meeting at Monte Carlo, withAristotle Onassis footing the bill. When that didn't work out, Eatonstepped in as patron and, because he sensed that the State Departmentwas not of a mind to admit some Soviet and Chinese scholars who wereon the guest list, proposed holding it on the more tolerant soil ofCanada, and specifically in Pugwash.The Pugwash conferences with which Eaton's name has beenlinked worldwide are the science conferences, and the first of these tookplace in July 1957. Einstein was dead by then; one of his lastmemorable statements had been “We must never relax our efforts toarouse m the peoples of the world, and especially in their governments,an awareness of the unprecedented disaster which they are absolutelycertain to bring on themselves unless there is a fundamental change intheir attitudes toward one another as well as in their concept of the14future. The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything exceptour way of thinking.” Lord Russell was ailing and couldn't make themeeting but he sent a recorded message with the British physicist C. F.Powell, one of three Nobel laureates (the others were Hideki Yukawa,of Japan, and H. J. Muller, of the United States) who did attend. In all,there were twenty-two distinguished scientists, from ten nations--among them, significantly, A. V. Topchiev, the general secretary of theSoviet Academy of Sciences, and Chou Pei-Yuan, vice-rector of PekingUniversity. Greeting his guests, Eaton declared, “A man's first moralobligation is to earn his living and his second is to be intelligent.” Afterthree days of non-income-producing but highly intellectual colloquy,interspersed with croquet and other undemanding diversions, theparticipants agreed, with one or two reservations, that man's misuse ofnuclear energy could well result in his annihilation; furthermore, theyresolved to hold more get-togethers to foster more joint thinking.Over the ensuing years, in England and Ethiopia, in Italy andQuebec, in Sweden and Yugoslavia, there have been a couple of dozenassemblies of Pugwash scientists. In his autobiography, Lord Russell,who served for a while as chairman of the Continuing Committee of thePugwash Movement, wrote, “Perhaps the unique characteristic of the1957 and subsequent Pugwash Conferences was the fact that themembers consorted with each other in their spare time as well as duringthe scheduled meetings, and grew to know each other as human beingsrather than merely as scientists of this or that potentially inimical beliefor nation. This most important characteristic was in large part madepossible by the astute understanding by Cyrus Eaton of the situation andwhat we wished to accomplish and by his tactful hospitality.” Withoutthe prior deliberations of the Pugwash scientists, the nuclear-test-bantreaty of 1963— unsatisfactory as many deemed it to be, because it15permitted underground explosions to be continued—might not havecome into being. The Pugwashites’ lengthy palavers have also producedthe phrase “hogwash from Pugwash.” However history may ultimatelyassess these gatherings, the fact that they occurred at all was in largemeasure attributable—as Gerard Piel, the publisher of ScientificAmerican, put it in 1972—to the circumstance that Eaton “recognizedyears ago that the fate and hope of mankind hangs upon the internationalcommunity of science, the international community of rational humanunderstanding.” (Piel's statement was made at the kind of part)' thatEaton likes to give: He invited a hunch of scientists to Pugwash to watcha solar eclipse, and proclaimed the occasion a tribute to SimonNewcomb, the Nova Scotian astronomer who is the only Canadian in theHall of Fame.) Eaton is no less fond of an encomium uttered at the 1957conclave by Professor A. M. B. Lacassagne, of L'Institut du Radium, inParis, who, Eaton recalls, “eloquently predicted that Pugwash, thoughonly a village, would live in history with Austerlitz and Waterloo, twoother villages that marked a drastic change in the course of humanevents.”Cleveland's steel mills and other industries have attracted to the citymany ethnic groups of Eastern European origin. Many of theCzechoslovakians, Poles, Lithuanians, and others who have settled inCleveland have been vociferously opposed to peaceful coexistence withthe Communist rulers of their forebears' soil. What has especiallyprovoked groups like the United Hungarian Societies of Cleveland andthe Coordinating Committee of Nations Under the Communist Yoke isthat while Eaton has seemed ever ready and willing to say derogatorythings about the United States (i.e., in 1958, “Hitler, in his prime,through the Gestapo, never had any such extensive spy organizations aswe have in this country today”), he has rarely had anything comparable16to say about the Soviet Union. The most critical comment he had on theRussian takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1968 was “I haven't found anynation where reason is paramount.”Eaton's interest in the Soviet Union—to which he has made eight redcarpetjourneys since 1958—was indirectly whetted by John D.Rockefeller, Sr. The first Russian whom Eaton ever met was BaronOxgall, a Moscow Baptist, who came to Cleveland at the turn of thecentury to solicit support from Rockefeller for the Moscow branch of theY.M.C.A. More important, Rockefeller's choice for the first president ofthe University of Chicago was his old friend and golfing companionWilliam Rainey Harper, a celebrated prodigy of his time—collegegraduate at fourteen, Ph.D. at eighteen, teen-age professor of Hebrew.Though not fluent in Russian, Harper was much taken with Russia; hisson Samuel—who used to play golf with Eaton on the Rockefellercourse when the two older men had finished their daily round--eventually became head of the Russian-language department at hisfather's university, and between 1904 and his death, at thirty-nine, in1941, spent half of every year in Russia. Just before Samuel Harper died,he defended the Nazi-Soviet pact so strenuously that he suffered anervous breakdown. A book of his that was posthumously published in1945, “The Russia I Believe In,” was not widely acclaimed, but Eatonbelieved in it so strongly that in 1969— long after the original editionhad been remaindered—he had it reissued, at his expense. “Sam'senthusiasm for Russian culture and Russian children had a great impacton my life,” Eaton says.Eaton had brushed against some Russians during the First World War,when he helped a purchasing mission from Moscow buy artillery shellsand field tents from Cleveland manufacturers, but it was not until 195517that he had solid contact with any. That year, the State Department wasshowing a group of Soviet journalists (among them Alexei Adzhubei,Khrushchev's son-in-law and the editor of Izvestia) around the UnitedStates. Cleveland was on the itinerary, and the principal scheduled eventfor the visitors' delectation there was a professional-football game. TheRussians said they didn't much care about the Browns, and wouldn't it bepossible for them to spend a few hours instead with a typical Americanbusinessman'1 Their escort from State phoned Eaton, who had not longbefore entertained some Russian farmers, and conveyed the request.Eaton retorted—and no one who knew him would have disagreed—thatif there was anything he was not, it was a typical Americanbusinessman. The escort hung up, but he called back soon afterward torepeat his plea; it seemed that there wasn't any other businessman of anysort in Cleveland who wanted anything to do with the Russians. Eatonsaid that in that case he'd be delighted to play host, and he drove into thecity to fetch the foreigners. To his consternation, he found them beinghectored by a crowd that had gathered—at, he was and still is convinced,the instigation of the F.B.I.—outside their hotel.Eaton got on splendidly with his guests the rest of that day, and thencame interchanges with other Russians at Pugwash meetings. His newfriends kept urging him to visit their country. So in the late summer of1958, on the eve of a Pugwash scientists' meeting in Austria, he decidedto go to Moscow. Some people are under the impression that Eaton hasspent much of his adult life commuting to Moscow, and are surprised tolearn that at the time of his initial visit to the Soviet Union he was nearlyseventy-five. (He had never yet set foot in any other Communistterritory, either.) He travelled to Moscow by way of New York andCopenhagen, where, with a characteristic bow to both the idealistic andthe pragmatic side of his personality, he had arranged to spend a few18hours with two influential natives: the nuclear physicist Niels Bohr andthe shipping magnate A. P. M0llcr. On the flight from New York toCopenhagen, Eaton and his wife found Andrei Gromyko sitting justbehind them. The capitalist and the Soviet Foreign Minister got tochatting, and Gromyko, who also knew about Pugwash, asked theAmerican to point out the spot as they flew over it. By the time theEatons reached Moscow, the Foreign Minister had sent word ahead forthem to be elaborately received, and he had also asked Eaton if he wouldlike to have a private audience with Premier Khrushchev, who wasvacationing at the Black Sea. Eaton said he'd be happy to fly down there.No, said Gromvko, the Premier would be pleased to meet Eaton morethan halfway—in fact, would come back to Moscow and see him at theKremlin. A couple of days later, Eaton and Khrushchev spent ninetyminutes together in the Troitskaia Tower. “We had an absolutelyhilarious time,” Eaton says. “I was feeling relaxed and full of fun andjokes. While we were talking, a bottle of mineral water exploded, itscork hitting the ceiling. Khrushchev said 'What was that?' and I said'That was John Foster Dulles firing at us from under the table,' andKhrushchev roared with laughter. He was also amused by my remarkingthat our State Department reminded me of the little man in the ArtemusWard story who said that he had outmaneuvered a big guy he wasfighting until he got his eye right on the other guy's fist.” Khrushchev,for his part, asked Eaton to let President Eisenhower know that hethought his passion for golf was very sensible “From that first meetingon, Khrushchev was always completely frank with me,” Eaton says,“and his successors have treated me in the same way.” Pravda carried aphotograph of Khrushchev and Eaton on its first page the next day, andthe Moscow radio hailed the American's professed interest in “theestablishment and development of friendship between the peoples” and“the preservation and strengthening of peace throughout the world.”19Pravda also ran an article by Eaton, in which he wrote that he hopedKhrushchev would soon visit the United States. “The people of theU.S.A. would respond to his directness, his sense of humor, and hissincere desire for world peace,” Eaton said.On Eaton's return from his quasi-summit conference with Khrushchev,he was invited to make a number of speeches. Before the City Club inCleveland, he took occasion to refer to “inflammatory editorials,reeking of bravado with their dire threats of slaughter to the Soviets.”He also told that audience that in his view Secretary of State Dulles was“an insane fanatic.” At the National Press Club, in Washington, he wenta step further, proposing that Dulles be supplanted in the Cabinet byJohn L. Lewis. He treated the Economic Club of Detroit to an address(“Is the World Big Enough for Both Capitalism and Communism?”) inwhich he said, “I would not know where to look for the American whowould want to trade our system for the Russian way,” and “When Icommented on Mr. Khrushchev's ability to speak decisively for hiscountry, he replied, 'Any policy I announce must first be discussed withthe Cabinet and backed by it. We make no decision unless we are sure itwill have the support of the people.'“ Eaton and Khrushchev kept intouch thereafter, on terms that were about as intimate as possiblebetween the head of a great state and a private citizen of another state,far removed. On Eaton's seventy-sixth birthday, the Russian sent him acablegram blending felicitations with a plea for total disarmament--“the most urgent task of our time.” On Eaton's eightieth birthday, Khrushchevreferred to him affectionately as, a “coexisting capitalist.” Thetwo men (periodically exchanged gifts. A Scotch 'Shorthorn bull thatEaton shipped to Khrushchev afforded the Premier an opportunity todemonstrate that Russians were every bit as capable as Americans ofinventing one special kind of witticism, “After the animal arrived in20Russia, I suddenly remembered that its name was Napoleon, and Iapologized to Mr. Khrushchev for this apparent tactlessness,” Eatonsays, “He replied, “If he's a good bull and produces good offspring, Iwouldn't care if his name were John Foster Dulles.'Khrushchev did visit the United States, in the fall of 1959, and Eatonsaw him at various receptions. During one of these, at the SovietEmbassy in Washington, with Vice-President Nixon also in attendance,the coexisting capitalist proposed a toast to eternal friendship betweennations, from which the Russian held aloof until somebody fetched himsome vodka to fortify the soda water that had been set before him. Thefollowing spring, on May 16th, the Soviet Premier and PresidentEisenhower met in Paris for l summit conference. It was a time ofdrama. On May 1st, Francis Gary Powers had been shot down in his U-2spy plane over Russian soil. Two days later, the U.S.S.R. had revealedthat Eaton would be getting the Lenin Peace Prize. The honoree, as ithappened, was about to take off on a trip to Eastern Europe, andKhrushchev, in Paris, asked him to stop over en route and say hello.Eaton said that he'd be glad to. When the summit conference broke upover the U-2 incident, Khrushchev sent a radio message to the planeEaton was on, saying he wondered whether, in view of what had justoccurred (the Chairman had, among other things, told the President ofthe United States to go dip his head in milk), Eaton still wanted to beseen with him. Eaton could think of no reason not to be. His planelanded at Orly Airport a few minutes before Khrushchev, his arms fullof red roses from some French admirers, was to take off for Berlin.With a considerable segment of the world's press looking on,Khrushchev gave the flowers to Mrs. Eaton. Khrushchev, sensing thatEaton would be criticized for fraternizing with him at this juncture inhistory, told the American jocularly, “When Communism has triumphedin the whole world, I shall put in a good word for you.” (Eaton, for his21part, told the Soviet leader the story about George Washington and thecherry tree, as a prelude to the suggestion that the United States haddissembled to Russia about the U-2 plane.) Khrushchev had guessedright: one letter in the Plain Dealer called Eaton's airport rendezvous“brazenly unpatriotic”Eaton moved on to Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and EastGermany, reemerging from behind the Iron Curtain in London. There,before a lunch at Claridge's with his old non-Communist friend LordBeaverbrook, he told reporters, who were always glad to quote hisprovocative pronouncements, that the United States was more of a policestate than any of the nations he'd just inspected. Then, on his return toCleveland, he favored the Plain Dealer with the remark “We are thewarlike nation of the world, and every nation outside the United Statesrecognizes that.” It was all too much for some Eaton-watchers to take. Aconvention of Ohio veterans passed a resolution condemning him, andSenator Thomas J. Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat, proposed that he beprosecuted under the so-called Logan Act—a 1799 statute, never beforeinvoked, under the terms of which persons can be fined five thousanddollars and imprisoned for three years for attempting “to influence themeasures or conduct of any foreign government or any officer or agentthereof” unless authorized to do so by the American government.(Following a break in diplomatic relations between France and theUnited States, Dr. George Logan, a Quaker, had gone to Paris on hisown to talk to Talleyrand.) Senator Dodd said that Eaton was a“materialistic, meddlesome, evil old man.” That was too much even forthe Plain Dealer, which rallied to Eaton's support, after a fashion: it slatededitorially that while he was un-arguably materialistic andmeddlesome, he wasn't evil but, rather, both foolish and brave.22THE twenty-seventh meeting of the Pugwash scientists was held inMunich this past August. Eaton did not attend it. In fact, he has had verylittle to do with any of these gatherings since 1960, although hecontinued to organize nonscientific conferences under the Pugwashbanner (One, at McGill University in 1969, to which he invited a halfdozenSinologists, almost certainly expedited Canada's resumption ofdiplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China) But since 1960he has not been officially connected with what became known as thePugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs. That year, hebecame too controversial for the movement he had helped to spawn. OnJuly 1, I960, he was formally invested with the Lenin Peace Prize.Twenty-five hundred people turned out at Eaton Park, in Pugwash, forthe ceremony. In his acceptance speech, Eaton said the occasion was “aproud and happy moment in my life.” He went on, “For the U.S.S.R.,leader of the Socialist nations, to pay such respect to an acknowledgedapostle of capitalism from the U.S.A., leader of the capitalist countries,offers a hopeful omen for brighter days ahead. I have said before, and Irepeat, that I sincerely believe Premier Khrushchev's United Nationsaddress of September 1959, with its clearly outlined disarmamentprogram, will go down as one of the historic utterances of modernyears.... It is a matter for regret that the Soviet proposals for generaland complete disarmament have not met with the sympathetic responseto which they are entitled.” Such remarks by Eaton were beginning todismay some of the Pugwash scientists, who were getting ready foranother symposium in late November, this one to take place in Moscow,and who feared that his close identification with their cause, combinedwith his outspokenness, might impair whatever effectiveness they couldhave. Chief among the disenchanted was Professor Eugene Rabinowitch,of the University of Illinois, who was a co-founder and the editor of theBulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the highly respected journal whose23board of sponsors, over the years, had included many of the scientistsEaton most revered—Einstein, Leo Szilard, J. Robert Oppenheimer, I. I.Rabi, and their like In the Bulletin of October, Eaton was dismayed tosee— appended to a reprint of a September newspaper headline aboutthe forthcoming Pugwash scientists' gathering which read, “EATON TOSPONSOR MOSCOW SESSION”—a demurrer, signed by Rabinowitchand two other scholars, to the effect that while they were grateful toEaton for prodigious past beneficences, “as Mr. Eaton has come to playan increasingly active and controversial role in political affairs, thescientists felt that his exclusive support of their conferences may placethem in the wrong light.” Further collaboration with him would beimpossible, they went on, because of his “reluctance to keep his supportof the scientists' conferences clearly separated from his increasinginvolvement.” Accordingly, the statement said, though he would bewelcome at the Moscow gathering as a guest, it would be solely as that,and neither as a participant nor as a sponsor. The patron of Pugwash hadbeen summarily depatronized.That Bulletin appeared concurrently with the annual meeting of theUnited Nations General Assembly, in New York. ChairmanKhrushchev had put himself on the agenda again. The Soviet Premierhad been in low American repute ever since the collapse of the Paristalks, and when he arrived, by ship, the United States governmentcontrived for it to dock at an obscure pier, with marginal facilities toshelter welcoming dignitaries from the rain. Khrushchev wasgreeted—in, as it happened, rain—by a handful of acolytes who hadalso come for the Assembly meeting; Wladyslaw Gomulka, of Poland;Antonin Novotny, of Czechoslovakia; Janos Kadar, of Hungary. Justabout the only Americans on hand, aside from a few offshore whowere shouting obscenities from small boats, were the Eatons. The24State Department had refused to let the Soviet Premier travel to Ohioto visit the Eatons’ farm, and, indeed, had restricted his movements sostringently that he couldn't even go from Manhattan to the Bronx,where the New York Yankees were about to play in the World Series.Eaton took bridling notice of this during a lunch he gave forKhrushchev at the Hotel Biltmore, where the Ohioan often occupied asuite, his myriad directorships having once included a seat on theboard of the Biltmore-Bowman Hotels Corporation. (There wasanother lunch for Kadar, and dinners for Gomulka and Novotny.) Atthe Khrushchev lunch, Eaton pressed the Chairman “to urge theathletes of the Soviet Union to take up baseball, so that someday therecould be a true World Series.” Khrushchev, referring to Eaton as “mygood old friend,” said in a toast to his host, “Just as I have no intentionof converting Mr. Eaton to the Communist faith, so, I hope, Mr. Eatonwould not waste his time trying to turn me into a supporter of thecapitalistic point of view.” Outside the hotel, pickets marched back andforth carrying placards inscribed “Cyrus Eaton Is a Traitor.” Eatonwas, as usual, unfazed. “These hostile demonstrations were organizedand paid for by our own government,” he said later. “It's humiliatingthat this great country has to stoop to that kind of conduct That lunchalso resulted in one of his deposals from the Social Register, though hewas not thrown off anybody s fund-raising list, and there were nodiscernible objections when, soon afterward, he contributed the prizesfor a Junior League fashion show back in Cleveland.Late that October, Eaton travelled to Ottawa to give a speech onthe occasion of the granting of the Bowater Awards—high honors inCanadian journalism. He had often been courted by reporters seekinginsight into Soviet acts and aspirations, and he courted reporters, too-,when Gay Talese passed through Cleveland a few years afterward on a25promotional tour for “The Power and the Glory,” his book about theNew York Times, Eaton tendered him the kind of lunch he wouldnormally put on for a Deputy Minister of Trade from Bulgaria. It alwaysmade Eaton feel good to read headlines like “FINANCIER PUTS U.S.ON PAN FOR KEEPING COLD WAR HOT” (Chicago Daily News)and “EATON PRAISES RED CHINA; URGES IT GET SEAT INU.N.” (Cleveland Press), and he was no less pleased by the journalisticattention he attracted abroad. He did sometimes complain that most Amen- ' can journalists had a built-in anti-Soviet bias, and he buttressedthat argument by citing an experience he had in Moscow immediatelyafter his get-together with Chairman Khrushchev in the fall of 1958.“Khrushchev suggested that he and I issue a joint statement about ourmeeting, and I said, 'Fine, you prepare it,' Eaton says. “It was sent overthe next morning, and I approved it. Then the Moscow correspondents oftwo American newspapers came around to interview me, and after a bitthey came back and said, 'we want you to know what kind of countryyou're in. Here's what we filed and here's what the censors cut out.’ Iread the uncensored version with astonishment. I had been drasticallymisquoted. It had been reported that I had attacked my hosts. I said tothem, 'If what you wrote had been published, it would have made theRussians think I'm unreliable. Why in the world would I have said whatyou wrote I said?' 'But you're an American capitalist, and we assumedyou'd denounce Communism,' they said. 'I'd never have the bad taste tosay anything like that about the head of a country while in his country.’I said.” Now, in Ottawa, surrounded by the elite of the Canadian press,Eaton seized the opportunity to further chide their colleagues across theborder. “Journalism in the United States, I fear, has fallen to acomparatively low estate in its foreign coverage,” he said in his speech.“Blind and unreasoning fear and hatred of Communism, on the part ofpress, public, and politician alike, have led to inadequate reporting of26conditions and events in the Socialist countries, and to slanted editorialcomment as well.'“ As an example, he cited recent press coverage inNew York. On October 2nd, Eaton said, there had been two Polishorientedevents in that city—a Pulaski Day parade, in which theparticipants were mainly anti-Communist Poles, and an address byPremier Gomulka. “The Gomulka speech was completely ignored by theAmerican press, although the Polish- American parade and otherfestivities were featured in articles and pictures,” he said. “An idea I aminclined to favor is the formation of volunteer local committees to serveas firm but friendly critics of the press.” Had a firm but friendlycommittee been formed on the spot, it could have pointed out to Eatonthat Gomulka's speech was made not on Pulaski Day but the dayafterward, and that the Times had covered it, though perhaps not at thelength Eaton might have deemed appropriate.Chairman Khrushchev was toppled on October 15, 1964.“Although his successors were perhaps a bit rough with him, I was notsurprised,” Eaton said later. “He had once told me, 'your people call mea dictator. Why, my Cabinet could turn me out of office tomorrow.' Andthat's of course what happened. I kept in touch with him after hisretirement, though I was a little careful while in Russia not to make apoint of trying to visit him, because I wanted to keep my position withthe men in power. But he was not at all unhappy at the end. He hadmerely made the mistake of trying to raise corn too far north in theU.S.S.R., which was his undoing. After his death, his widow told methat one of the great satisfactions of his life was that I remainedfriendly with him even when he was only a private citizen.”NOT long after Bertrand Russell's death, in 1970, at ninety-seven,the then eighty-six-year-old Eaton told ' an acquaintance, “Russell was a27very capable man, but he had a capacity for arousing the criticism of alot of people.” The remark could have been autobiographical. Evenbefore he attained comradeship with Khrushchev, Eaton's capacity forunpopular assertions had aroused criticism right and left, though mostlyright. The September, 1958, issue of the conservative AmericanMercury, for instance, carried a near-apoplectic reaction to a Tassrelease of the previous June to the effect that Khrushchev had thankedEaton for his “efforts to end the menace of a nuclear war.” Eaton hadearlier poured fuel on the fire when he appeared on a Mike Wallacetelevision show on May 4, 1958, and delivered a no-holds-barred attackon both the F.B.I, and the C.I.A., agencies then thought to be more orless above reproach. “I always worry when I see a nation feel that it iscoming to greatness through the activities of its policemen,” Eaton saidthen. “And the F.B.I, is just one of the scores of agencies in the UnitedStates engaged in investigating, in snooping, in informing, in creepingup on people. This has gone to an extent that is very alarming.... I amjust as sure as I am alive that one of these days there will be anenormous reaction against this in the United States….We can't destroyCommunism. It's there to stay….And to imagine that they could convertus to Communism is just silly….No one in the world would be moreunhappy under Communism than I, because I am dedicated to the otherprinciple….The Russians have never had freedom, and it would takethem some time to know what to do with it.” Despite this last remark,the then much-feared House Un-American Activities Committeeconsidered Eaton's views to be within its province, demanded and gotequal time, and a staff operative announced that the committee wasgoing to subpoena Eaton. The New York Daily News, which had longascribed to Eaton a degree of villainy ordinarily achieved only by DickTracy's worst enemies, thought that the idea of a subpoena was first-rate,and expressed the editorial hope that the committee would ask him28which side he'd be on in the event of a war between the Soviet Unionand the United States. No subpoena was ever served, though ampleopportunities arose; one came up soon in Washington, when Eaton— intown to dine at the Soviet Embassy—had a heated confrontation with thechairman of the committee in the office of one of its other members.Shortly after Eaton's lambasting of the F.B.I, on television, former AttorneyGeneral Herbert E Brownell spoke before the Cleveland BarAssociation and called the hometown man's allegations—the hometownpapers naturally had their pencils poised—”wild and reckless.” ThePress observed that proof that the United States was not, as Eaton hadseemed to suggest, a police state lay in the fact that the suggester wasstill at liberty. The Cleveland chapter of the anti-Communist LithuanianAmerican Council mailed Eaton a copy of J. Edgar Hoover's “Masters ofDeceit,” presumably hoping he would read it and get straightened out.Hoover himself would say for the record merely that Eaton was runningtrue to character. The Director of the F.B.I., though not normallyclosemouthed himself, rarely took overt cognizance of Eaton's existence;one of the few times he appeared to do so was when he told asubcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee that the Studentsfor a Democratic Society and other campus troublemakers were gettingmoney from “a Cleveland industrialist who has long been a Sovietapologist.” If Hoover meant Eaton, his investigators had served himpoorly. Eaton had very little use for American student radicals. “Ihaven't given any of them anything,” he told a friend. “When they comearound, I tell them, 'You've got to change your outlandish garb, cut yourhair and whiskers, and stop looking like baboons. Otherwise, people arejust going to make fun of you and think you're not very profound.' InNova Scotia once, a young lady brought her fiancé around to meet me soI could advise him on his future, and I said the first thing he ought to dowas shave off his beard. He was awfully embarrassed, and I learned why29later, when the girl came by again and said she had made him grow it toprove he was a radical. The whole thing was ridiculous.”Eaton met Hoover only once—at the Laurel, Maryland, racetrackone Saturday, when the Eaton troika was part of the between-racesentertainment. The two men chatted briefly— and, in both instances,knowledge-ably—about horses. Eaton knew Herbert Hoover muchbetter than he did his namesake. When President Hoover was in theWhite House, the Cleve-lander was several times an overnight guest,and he would join the Chief Executive and some members of hisCabinet in the pre-breakfast medicine-ball tossing that was, trout fishingexcepted, the athletic hallmark of that Administration. Eaton likes tocredit President Hoover with having taught him to read newspapers fast.(Eaton has nearly a dozen of them delivered to him daily—fromCleveland, Akron, Chicago, New York, Washington, London, andToronto.) After the medicine-ball sessions, Hoover and his guest wouldride upstairs in a White House elevator to shower and change. ThePresident would be handed half a dozen morning papers as he steppedinto the elevator, and, in Eaton's recollection, would deftly skim thefront pages of all of them before reaching his destination two flights up.It surprises no one who has followed Eaton's iconoclastic career that herates Herbert Hoover, along with the senior Rockefeller andKhrushchev, as one of the finest people he has ever known. “Hooverwas an extremely able and honorable man.” Eaton says, “and if hehadn't been hit by a panic—through no particular fault of his own—he'dbe remembered as one of the greatest Presidents the United States everhad.LIKE most nonagenarians, Cyrus S. Eaton, who has probablybeen more often accused of Communistic leanings than anyone else on30earth with such an unbreakable addiction to both the theory and thepractice of capitalism, remembers his boyhood best. Eaton, who willturn ninety-four two days after Christmas, was the fifth of nine childrenborn in the coastal village of Pugwash, Nova Scotia, to Joseph HoweEaton, a farmer, lumberman, and general-store proprietor of Englishancestry. The first Eaton crossed the Atlantic in the seventeenth century.A later Eaton, who may or may not have contributed to the feisty genesthat sifted down to Cyrus, was Daniel Isaac, a London printer, who wastwice hauled into court in 1793 for publishing works by Thomas Paine,and who the following year was accused of libeling King George III bycomparing him—in a pamphlet entitled “Politics for the People, orHog's Wash”—to a gamecock. (Cyrus has often been in the courtshimself, but never for anything as gaudy as libel; his once comparingRichard Nixon, when he was President, to Adolf Hitler and John FosterDulles, when Secretary of State, to any old madman, have gonejurisprudentially unchallenged.) David Eaton, Cyrus’s great-great-greatgrandfather,founded the Nova Scotia branch of the clan in 1761, aftermoving there from Connecticut, but it was only in the early nineteenthcentury that the Eatons settled in Pugwash—a Micmac Indian wordmeaning “deep water.” By then, many British Loyalists had moved toCanada from the American Colonies, among them the MacPhersons,who were originally from the Scottish Highlands. Cyrus Eaton's motherwas born Mary Adelle MacPherson. (A cousin of Eaton's maternalgrandfather was Donald McKay, who left Nova Scotia for this countryat seventeen and became the builder of many of the swiftest clipperships ever launched, among them the celebrated Flying Cloud.) But noone far removed from the village had ever paid much attention to it untilEaton, in the nineteen-fifties, began inviting intellectuals there to sharetheir thoughts with him. Today, he is the town's most famous native sonA new grade school has just been named after him; the local31government has put up road signs that read “Pugwash—Home of theThinkers” and prominent among the souvenirs available to transientsare replicas of Rodin's sedentary brooding figure.According to Eaton's recollections of his early childhood, his fatherhad him riding horses at four, milking cows at five, and working for therailroad at six. “We were quite well-to-do, relatively speaking,” Eatonsays, “We had a hired man and a hired girl, as people permittedthemselves to be called in those days. When the railroad decided to puttracks through our place, though, and somebody had to carry waterfrom a spring to where the men were working with their picks andshovels, I wanted the job, and I got it. I was paid fifty cents for a tenhourday. By the tune I was ten, I was pretty well experienced inbusiness and in world affairs—my father was also postmaster, and I usedto read all the newspapers that came in to subscribers—and by the time Iwas twelve my father would send me out to measure the logs hislumbermen were felling. That was important, because they got paid bythe foot.”Eaton attended elementary school in Pugwash and high school atAmherst Academy, thirty miles away. At the turn of the century, hematriculated at McMaster University, then a small Baptist institution inToronto. (At Eaton's much later urging, a larger and less sectarianMcMaster became the repository of most of the papers of BertrandRussell.) Eaton chose McMaster mainly because his father's youngerbrother, Charles Aubrey) Eaton, then a Baptist minister, was on its boardof governors. Originally, Cyrus planned to follow his uncle's vocation.When Charles Eaton was assigned to the Euclid Avenue Baptist Church,in Cleveland, in 1901, he invited his nephew down during his summervacation. Among the uncle's parishioners was John D. Rockefeller, Sr.32who had founded his empire in Cleveland and customarily spent fivemonths a year at Forest Hill, a seven-hundred-acre local enclave he hadbuilt, with a private nine-hole golf course. Rockefeller wassuperintendent of the Reverend Mr. Eaton's Sunday school. The twoalso shared many non-devotional moments, for the minister lived nextdoor to Forest Hill, and was John D’s frequent guest and golfingcompanion—often in a foursome that included not merely the cautiousolder man's spiritual mentor but also his doctor and his dentist.Charles Eaton moved far beyond the pulpit. He coupled journalismwith preaching, and after a ten-year stint in New York City as pastor ofthe Madison Avenue Baptist Church he went into industrial relations forGeneral Electric* In 1924, at the age of fifty-six, he was elected toCongress, on the Republican ticket, from New Jersey, He served in theHouse for twenty-eight years, ultimately becoming chairman of theForeign Affairs Committee. In 1945, he was one of eight Americansigners, in San Francisco, of the United Nations Charter. AroundWashington, where he was affectionately called Doc, he also becameknown as “the conscience of the House,” Like his nephew after him.Representative Eaton was an enthusiastic advocate of unity among thedivers peoples of the globe, hut he never shared his nephew'sacceptance of most words and deeds emanating from the Soviet Union.In fact, he was once denounced as a nefarious capitalist before the U.N,General Assembly by Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Vishinskv, whocoupled him, not without historical justification, with the Rockefellerfamily. The Congressman's sometimes bristling comments about Russianever particularly affected his nephew. “I remained a devoted friend ofUncle Charles right up to his death, in 1953, even though he wasn'tinclined to trust the Russians,” Cyrus Eaton says. “He was quite sincerein his dislike of Communism in all its forms. He thought I was being too33good-natured and trusting, but our conflicting attitudes never interferedwith our devotion to each other.”Cyrus Eaton's apprenticeship to the Baptist Church was brief.Having even as a teen-ager developed a strong bent for rationalism, hefound the church's orthodoxy oppressive. He did get as far, though, asbeing listed in the Cleveland city directory of 1906 as pastor of the Lakewood Baptist Church. His decision not to be ordained was in partinfluenced by some advice he had received from Mr. Rockefeller: “Besure to have some ownership or participate in the development of naturalresources.” Soon after Cyrus’s arrival in Cleveland, his uncle took himto dinner at Forest Hill, and when Mrs. Rockefeller learned that theCanadian lad was about to take a job as night clerk at the Euclid Hotelshe urged her husband to offer him something more suitable to his socialstatus. So Eaton went to work for Rockefeller. He ran errands, carriedgolf bags, and acted as a bodyguard. “Because I was a sturdy youth whohad demonstrated physical courage in Mr. Rockefeller's presence a timeor two, I was delegated to sit near him in church, on the alert for intruders,”Eaton has recalled. For his services as all-around factotum,Rockefeller paid him two dollars a day.Eaton continued to work for Rockefeller during subsequent vacations,and his employer would now and then suggest that he quitcollege and join him on a full-time basis, presumably with some increasein remuneration One summer, the philanthropist sought to broaden theyoung man's experience by lending him out to the East Ohio GasCompany, on whose behalf Eaton traipsed around Cleveland trying toplacate property owners whose lawns were being ravaged by the layingof gas mains. To this day, Eaton's respect for his early patron isunabated. “There's never been any man in finance or industry who came34close to matching John D. Rockefeller in imagination or in application,”he said recently. “And he was, fortunately, well represented in hisdescendants. The Rockefellers are America's greatest family.” ThroughRockefeller, Eaton met a lawyer who was looking for somebody torepresent a syndicate formed to buy utilities franchises in westernCanada. Eaton knew the area and was hired, but by the time he arrivedon the scene the panic of 1907 was in full swing and the syndicate haddisintegrated. Eaton wangled a loan from a neighbor and bought thefranchises himself, later combining them into the Canada Gas & ElectricCorporation. While he was at it, he acquired additional utilitiesfranchises in Iowa, Kansas, and Nebraska. By 1912, he had set up thefirst of innumerable holding companies with which he would at one timeor another be affiliated. This one was called Continental Gas & Electric,and when someone offered to buy it two years later, he realized that atthe age of thirty, though hardly in a class with Rockefeller, he was anauthentic millionaire.Before the First World War, Eaton bought a substantial interest inOtis & Company, the Cleveland investment bankers and stockbrokers.Through Otis, which in its heyday was one of the largest securities firmsoutside New York (its partners had assets of more than two hundredmillion dollars before the 1929 crash), he set up an investment trustcalled Continental Shares, Inc., which speculated chiefly in utilities andindustrial stocks. By 1929, its assets were more than a hundred and fiftymillion dollars, though when the company foundered into liquidationfour years later there remained only a tenth of that for distributionamong its aggrieved shareholders. En route from glory to gloom, Eatonhad had a memorable encounter with Samuel Insult, the utilities king ofChicago, who later went bankrupt. Between 1926 and 1930, ContinentalShares gobbled up all the stock it could get in Insull's principal35companies—Commonwealth Edison, People’s Gas, Light & Coke, andPublic Service Company of Northern Illinois. The Eaton crowd ownedmore of Insull than Insult did himself. Insull got the impression thatEaton was trying to take him over, so he asked to buy back his ownstock. After lengthy negotiations, Eaton agreed, in the spring of 1930, tosell it, with the proviso that he be paid not in shares of still othercorporations, which was how Insull liked to pay for things, but in cash.Fearing that Eaton might dump the stock on the open market at a timewhen the market was, to put it mildly, shaky, Insull agreed. He gaveEaton forty-eight million dollars in cash, much of it borrowed from NewYork banks, plus eight million dollars in securities. This added up tofour million dollars more than the market value of the shares in question,nineteen million more than Continental had paid for them initially.Eaton, whom one Insull biographer later called “a creative capitalist inspite of his reputation as a financial buccaneer,” was gracious in victory.In 1934, when Insull was put on trial for various financial peccadilloes,Eaton went to federal court in Chicago and testified in his defense.Throughout the roaring twenties, Eaton had been practically a one-mansonic boom. He was into everything—buying, selling, swapping,maneuvering, manipulating His touch was of the purest gold. An oilcompany in which he invested ten million dollars dug a lot of dry holes,but he was able to sell his stock in it for twenty-five million dollarsnotwithstanding, because it had options on real estate that turned out tobe ideal sites for the service stations of rival companies. Just after theFirst World War, Ohio had two telephone services— the Ohio Bellsystem and small independent companies in all communities of anyconsequence; in order to enjoy any land of useful service, people neededtwo phones. Eaton thought this was nonsensical. He contrived to put allthe independents together under a single corporate umbrella—Ohio StateTelephone—and then he got that consolidated with Ohio Bell. Next, to36his own handsome profit, he persuaded the state's Public UtilitiesCommission to grant the merged company a substantial increase in rates,on the ground that life was simpler for Ohioans now that they had to payonly one phone bill a month instead of two. In 1923, he formed autilities holding company called United Light & Power, whicheventually con-trolled gas and electric service in a dozen states, andwhich by 1929 had assets of more than half a billion dollars. Meanwhile,he had cast his acquisitive eye on rubber, and by 1928 he had asubstantial interest in Goodyear Tire & Rubber. He was big in steel, too.He saw no reason for Pittsburgh's financial monopoly of that industry,and he wanted steel production to be a mighty factor in the economicblossoming of the Midwest. Cleveland, with its access to the GreatLakes and its proximity to the automobile manufacturers in Detroit,seemed to him the logical hub of this new industrial universe. In 1925,the Trumbull Steel Company, in Warren, Ohio, was in desperate financialstraits, and needed a new and robust infusion of capital. Eaton,who still lagged behind Rockefeller but was doing his darnedest to catchup, unblinkingly wrote out a check for eighteen million dollars forcontrol of Trumbull Steel. In 1927, he drew Republic Iron & Steel intohis expanding metallurgical orbit, and in practically no time at allconverted that into Republic Steel by fusing it with Trumbull, CentralAlloy Steel, Steel & Tubes, Donner Steel, Union Drawn Steel, andBourne-Fuller—this last a Cleveland company that had supplied the nutsand bolts that held together both the Union Navy and the BrooklynBridge. Tom M. Girdler, the flinty industrialist whom Eaton recruited topreside over Republic Steel, said in his memoirs that Eaton's“mysterious buying of stock in steel companies had excited the interestof everybody in the industry.” Girdler, who went to work for Eaton onOctober 28, 1929, the day before the stock market collapsed, thought hisnew boss was “as smart as any man I ever met.” Eaton had also become37a major investor in Youngstown Sheet & Tube by 1930, when EugeneGrace and Charles M. Schwab tried to take it over, merge it with theirBethlehem Steel Corporation, and thus create an entity that would havethe size and clout of U.S. Steel. Eaton, hoping instead to mergeYoungstown with Republic, fought the proposed merger with assortedweapons, including a court battle over proxies. He lost that particularfight but instituted another suit, which he won, thus scoring a solidvictory over the East Coast financial world. “How are we going to haveleadership in this vast country if everything must be directed from WallStreet?” he asked. “It would make clerks of us all here in the MiddleWest.” In the course of that litigation, Eaton became an intractable foeof the corporation lawyer Newton D Baker, who represented Bethlehem,and who once likened Eaton to a portrait of Napoleon in the Louvre--one in which the Emperor was depicted riding to conquest between rowsof corpses. In 1932, when the Democratic Party convened to choose itsPresidential candidate, Eaton got his revenge. Baker was an earlycontender for the nomination. In Eaton's version of political history, itwas his success in persuading James A. Farley and William G. McAdooto join him in a stop-Baker movement that ultimately swung thenomination to Franklin D. Roosevelt.By 1929, still in his mid-forties, Eaton was a director of more thana dozen corporations, and was widely known, and sometimes feared, asa shrewd, hard-headed, cold-blooded fiscal wizard whose guidingphilosophy, as one acquaintance summarized it, was “All's fair in loveand war, and business is the war of peace.” According to the perhapsslightly biased author of “The Eaton Family of Nova Scotia,” which waspublished that year, Cyrus had “a future of unlimited possibilities beforehim.” Eaton's income in the heady year of 1929 was so substantial thatin later litigation over the federal income tax due on it he argued that the38government had made a miscalculation that tilted the bottom line in itsfavor by more than four hundred and twenty-seven thousand dollars.Then came the crash, which hit Cleveland especially hard; three of itsbig banks closed their doors. By the mid-thirties, when all the tangledaffairs of all of Eaton's corporations had been unraveled as well as theyever could be, he had little left beyond a stake in Otis & Company. Oneof his daughters was glad to land a sixty-dollar-a-month job as areceptionist in a Cleveland law office; when she got married, not longafterward, her father, coming around to her place for Christmas dinner,could bring only a basket of jellies and apples and a ten-dollar bill. Hewould eventually prosper again, but for a while he had hard going.When he was divorced from his first wife, in 1934, it was stipulated inthe settlement that if his net worth ever reached the level of a hundredand five thousand dollars he would have to buy her a house. At no stageof his topsy-turvy career has he been a lavish spender. Though he enjoysthe good life—in Paris, he stays at the Ritz; in London, at Claridge's—hehas never emulated his mentor Rockefeller in philanthropy. The CyrusEaton Foundation is too small to warrant inclusion in the FoundationDirectory. One of his children said not long ago, “If I needed a hundreddollars or a loaf of bread, my father would be the last person I'd turn to.”In fact, Eaton may not be as affluent as he sometimes lets people thinkhe is. Recently, an Ohioan who knows him about as intimately asanyone does told an acquaintance that there were probably a hundredpeople in Cleveland alone who were richer than EatonEaton's first wife was Margaret House, the daughter of a Clevelandphysician. He married her in 1907 after they had met at a Baptist Churchsocial function. Before they separated, in the thirties, they had sevenchildren. One, Margaret Grace, known as Lee, spent her adult life in awheelchair, following botched spinal surgery; after she died, at forty, herfather donated some land in the Cleveland suburb of Northfield for a Lee39Eaton Primary School, Eaton's youngest son, MacPherson, became anordained Baptist minister, but not until he was in his forties. Not all ofEaton's children have always applauded their father's publicpronouncements. “My father's views are not mine,” one daughter told aCleveland paper in 1959, when his sponsoring of conferences ofintellectuals in Pugwash and his hobnobbing with Nikita Khrushchevwere creating something of an international stir. “I think there are betterways to spend money than to hold conferences or make speeches.”Eaton's children were raised chiefly in Northfield, twenty miles fromdowntown Cleveland He bought a late-eighteenth-century house on acouple of dozen acres there in 1912 and, in deference to the early Frenchname for Nova Scotia, called it Acadia Farms. The house was close to aroad, and Eaton thought at first that he'd have the building razed and anew but similar residence constructed farther from the traffic. Heengaged an architect, who, having heard of his client's fiscalachievements, came back with plans for a replacement that would cost,he estimated, about a million and a half dollars. “I'D stay with the oldhouse,” Eaton said, and he has stayed with it ever since. Just inside hisfront door is an example of the kind of memento that his singularcrusading has won for him— a Stuffed boar's head from his sharpshootingfriend Chairman Khrushchev. When Eaton gave a lunch partyin 1962 to mark the fiftieth anniversary of his occupancy of AcadiaFarms (he thriftily used the same caterer's marquee for astepdaughter's coming-out dance that evening), among the guests werethe Bulgarian, Czechoslovakian, Hungarian, Polish, and Rumanian Ambassadors.Over the years, he has increased the size of his estate to itspresent eight hundred acres. And he has given some of it away: in 1955,he transferred fifty-eight virgin acres to the city of Cleveland to formpart of what Clevelanders speak of as their Ring of Green, or EmeraldBelt.40Living as he does on a place that is called a farm, Eaton prefers to callhimself not a financier or an industrialist—or, as others have called him,a tycoon—but, rather, a farmer. He believes that one of the reasons heand Khrushchev were attracted to one another was that both of them hadbeen raised on farms After a visit to Cuba in 1968, at a time fewAmericans were heading that way, Eaton was asked in what capacity hehad gone there, and he said, “I'm just a farmer,” adding that he hadtalked with Fidel Castro mostly about the artificial insemination ofcattle. (Eaton was pleased to be introduced by Castro to a hundredthousand-dollar prize bull, housed in an air-conditioned stall with musicpiped in.) As a farmer, Eaton is understandably partial to trees, and hisdevotion to them may exceed that of most tillers of the soil It has beensaid of him in print without his entering a denial that he can name all thetrees, plus all the birds, native to the entire North American continent,and an admiring employee at Acadia Farms not long ago remarked ofthe proprietor, ' He knows every tree here by its first name.” After Eatondrifted away from the Baptist Church, when he was asked which was hispreferred religion he -would sometimes choose Druidism, becauseDruids worshipped trees. He is as fond of poetry as he is of trees. Heprofesses to have read some lines of poetry every single day of his adultlife, and it follows that one of his favorite poems (along withShakespeare's sonnets, Tennyson's “Ulysses,” Milton's sonnet on hisblindness, and Keats' “On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer”) isJoyce Kilmer's dendrological chef-d'oeuvre. In 1962, in exchange for ahundred and seventy-three thousand dollars, Eaton granted theCleveland Electric Illuminating Company, of which he was a directorfrom 1955 to 1965, an easement across twenty-four acres of hisfarmland to build a power line. The line went in without incident, hut inApril 1970, C.E.I. started work on a second line while Eaton's attentionwas elsewhere, and chopped down four hundred and fifty of his trees.41The normally pacifistic Eaton all hut declared war. An Eaton truck wasrammed by a C.E.I, bulldozer whose progress it was trying to block.Eaton filed a seven-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar lawsuit againsthis erstwhile associates and stormed into Summit County Common PleasCourt toting a slaughtered stump. His anguish was only partly assuagedwhen the utilities company, probably suspecting that otherwise its feudwith the then eighty-eight-year-old adversary might go on forever,settled for an additional hundred and fifty-one thousand dollars.One portion of Acadia Farms is devoted to the breeding and raising ofScotch Shorthorn cattle, a specimen of which Eaton had shipped to theSoviet Union in 1955 in an effort to improve the quality of Russian beef.Scotch Shorthorns, like Eatons, came to North America early; theEnglish brought some over in 1783, and they were the first variety ofcattle bred specifically for beef to graze on American grass. Eaton'sanimals have won many prizes, and since 1951 he has held a biennialcattle auction on his premises. Some Russian livestock experts were inthe States at the time of the 1961 sale, but the State Department wouldn'tlet them visit Summit County; some East Germans who also hoped toattend couldn't even get into the country The all-time star of the Eatonstable was P. S. Troubadour, a steer that in 1956 was proclaimed theInternational Grand Champion among all kinds of cattle. The “P.S.” inits name came from Penn State. The university bought Troubadour'smother from Eaton while she was in calf. Troubadour himself was laterpurchased from Penn State by the Greenbrier Hotel, which belonged tothe Chesapeake & Ohio Railway. That transaction was easy enough toarrange, because Eaton was by then into railroads and was chairman ofthe board of the C. & O. (He had two prize oxen at his farm called C.and O.) The price was a robust $20,397.50. The Greenbrier serves goodcuts of beef, but it used Troubadour for promotional purposes The42animal was featured, along with Eaton, on an Ed Murrow “Person toPerson” television show, and it went on tour for a while— in its ownrailway car, attended by a handler. On July 4, 1957, it paid a patrioticcourtesy call on President Eisenhower at his farm, in Gettysburg. Eatonwanted to send Troubadour to Russia, too, as a hefty symbol of coexistence,but an outbreak of hoof-and-mouth disease in Europe stymiedthat scheme. Troubadour died in 1959; a decade later, Shorthorn Worldacclaimed Eaton as “Shorthorndom's most famous breeder,” Eaton alsoraises cattle at his other principal residence—Deep Cove Farms, a threethousand-acre establishment in Upper Blandford, Nova Scotia, ahundred and fifty miles from Pugwash. Though he became a citizen ofthe United States in 1913, he has retained a strong affection for Canada,and up to the last couple of years used to take both summer and wintervacations there. At Deep Cove Farms, he has also bred waterfowl,among them the first European widgeons ever raised in North America-Eaton's relationship with his grandchildren, who number fourteen, hasbeen unusual and intense As each of them became old enough to walk,the grandfather would take the child, sometimes over its parents’protests, to Upper Blandford for a summer month, in the company ofbrothers and sisters and first cousins. No mothers or fathers werepermitted to tag along. It was such a happy experience for the youthfulguests that some of them who are now in their thirties still go back toDeep Cove Farms whenever they can, and at least two of the malegrandchildren elected to take their brides there for honeymoons. Thegrandchildren had to follow a strict regimen Eaton had a theory that a totas young as two could do something useful around a house—help makea bed, say, or clear a table. He would assemble his clan for breakfasteach morning and impart the orders for that day— laundry, orwoodcraft, or bird spotting, or a lecture on local history, or ridding aroad of rocks. When it rained, all hands would be fitted out with foul43weather gear and marched off to climb the nearest mountain. To managethe crowd, Eaton would augment his regular household staff with acouple of patient college students. (His full-time majordomo since1953 has been a French Canadian who until he joined Eaton was aCanadian Pacific Railway dining-car superintendent and also a memberof the Nova Scotia legislature.) On the top floor of the Upper Blandfordfarmhouse, Eaton set up two dormitories—one for girls, one for boys. Ifthere were too many children on the scene to fit into them, the overflowwas harbored in tents. There were frequent picnics Eaton loves picnicsalmost as much as trees. He used to give an annual picnic at AcadiaFarms for Chesapeake & Ohio employees and their families, but he hadto stop after the C- & O. absorbed the Baltimore & Ohio system; hecould not comfortably accommodate more than a couple of thousandpicnickers at once. During most of the years in which Eaton ran hissummer camp, he was much featured in the press, but the children in hisengaging company were all but unaware of his not always flatteringcelebrity. “To me, my grandfather was simply the man I played tenniswith,” one of them said years afterward. To Eaton, the family holidayswere an unalloyed joy, though not without risks: when he was seventyone,one of his grandchildren gave him the mumps.A firm believer in physical fitness, Eaton was cool toward oneprospective son-in-law until the young man grabbed a tennis racquet andbeat him at singles. At Acadia Farms on winter weekends, he wouldcorral whichever grandchildren showed up, shepherd them to a frozenpond, and play ice hockey with them. He skied every winter until heturned eighty-seven, but he remained contemptuous of ski lifts. He hadbegun skiing before lifts were invented, and he believed that half thechallenge of the pastime was climbing up a hill before sliding down it.He never could get the hang of rope tows; he kept falling off them, with44indignity and indignation. At seventy-five, he stopped riding jumpers.He had begun riding at four (he started his own children in at one), andhe belonged to two hunt clubs. Since he reached ninety-two, he hasreluctantly given up all sports, but he still walks a couple of miles a day.Fifty years ago, he suffered from chronic indigestion. A doctor heconsulted urged him to forswear tobacco, alcohol, tea, coffee, andcorned-beef hash. Since then, his staple potables have been orange juiceand hot water. “Sir William Osier once said that a man should eschewLady Nicotine, Bacchus, and the younger Aphrodites,” Eaton likes tosay. “A lot of my contemporaries have had shorter lives because they didnot obey Sir William's injunctions.” One of Eaton's physicians attributeshis healthy longevity to a capacity for instant sleep. The doctor oncejoined Eaton on an inspection tour of an iron mine. The two men wereassigned to the same room in a bunkhouse. Before his companion evenhad both shoes off, Eaton was in bed and snoring.IN the mid-nine teen-thirties, Eaton began hauling himself back upthe financial ladder, at first principally through the underwriting ofrailroad and utilities bonds. These had traditionally and profitably beenmarketed through the large Wall Street investment-banking houses, withlittle or no prior competitive bidding to determine who would manage anoffering. Fighting Wall Street was for Eaton not merely a means ofmaking money; it was fun, and it also took on the dimensions of acrusade. Nothing pleased him more than to learn, in 1947, that he federalgovernment had indicted seventeen East Coast investment-bankinghouses for allegedly having arranged among themselves to handle twothirdsof all the country's underwriting business over the previous nineyears “The nation simply will no longer stand for the continuedconcentration of financial control in a few hands and in one place,because it has been amply demonstrated that such control militatesagainst the creative and constructive finance that is the keystone of our45free-enterprise system,” Eaton said in a prepared statement. “The NewYork houses that have been indicted form a colorless fraternity, bandedtogether to do only the riskless, high-grade business and to divide it upinto tiny participations, according to fixed percentages, with the housesthat should be their competitors.” In his efforts to make the underwritingbusiness more truly competitive, Eaton found an eager accomplice inanother alien to the Establishment—Robert R. Young, the Texan who,until his suicide in Palm Beach in 1958, cut quite a swath through theAmerican railroad industry. “Young was a man of great courage,” Eatonsays, “and we were friends in all areas, although he grew more interestedin the social life of Newport and Palm Beach than I could ever be, andthough he didn't entirely share my interest in seeking answers to theproblems that concern philosophers and scholars.” Young's first bigrailroad acquisition was the Chesapeake & Ohio, and his domination ofit was solidified by a thirty-million-dollar refinancing, which therailroad's directors had planned to confer, as was the routine practice, onthe familiar old Wall Street houses of Morgan Stanley and KuhnLoeb. Eaton, through Otis & Company, joined with the Chicago firm ofHalsey, Stuart and, by underbidding the New Yorkers, forced therailroad's board to throw its business their way. Young put Eaton on theC. & O. board of directors in 1943, and in 1954, when Young left towage his successful battle to control the New York Central, he sold hisC. & O. stock to Eaton, who succeeded him as chairman.All this skirmishing for control of railroads inevitably involved thefederal government. In threading their way through the bureaucraticmazes of Washington, Eaton and Young attracted the sympatheticattention of Senator Harry S. Truman. Eaton had first met Truman in thenineteen-t wen ties in Kansas City, where Eaton had a stranglehold onpublic utilities (and, of course, saw nothing wrong with that). The two46men met again in Washington in 1941, when Eaton testified—inopposition to Wall Street— at some Securities and Exchange Commissionhearings on the intricacies of financing utilities bonds. At aboutthat time, with the United States at war, Eaton learned from friends ofhis in Canada about the discovery of a vast deposit of iron ore beneathSteep Rock Lake, in northwestern Ontario. He remembered what JohnD. Rockefeller, Sr., had told him two score years earlier about naturalresources; by then, moreover, he himself had concluded that “iron ore isthe foundation of American industry.” Eaton went to Ontario and, fromcanoe and airplane, scrutinized Steep Rock Lake. There was no questionabout the potential value to the Allied war effort of the ore under thewater; the problem was how to get rid of the water. After talking tosome engineers, Eaton concluded that this could be accomplished, at acost of no more than seven or eight million dollars, by regiments ofpumps and a three-thousand-foot drainage tunnel. With the backing ofthe Canadian government, he went to Washington in the fall of 1942 tosubmit his proposal to the War Production Board, which did not thinkmuch of the idea until Senator Truman, chairman of the SenateCommittee to Investigate the National Defense Program, gave it hisblessing. Then, with the W.P.B. prodded into his corner, Eaton was ableto go to the Canadian government and the Reconstruction FinanceCorporation for assistance. By 1947, the onetime lake bed was yieldingup iron ore at the rate of a million tons a year, through two corporationsorganized by Eaton. One of them, Premium Iron Ores, of whose stockhe controlled seventy-four per cent, acted as Steep Rock's sales agent.For obtaining contracts to sell ten million tons of the ore over a ten-yearperiod, Premium received nearly a million and a half shares of the other,Steep Rock Iron Mines, at a price of a penny a share. In 1955, theInternal Revenue Service contended that Eaton owed it ten milliondollars in back taxes, on the ground that the Steep Rock shares for47which he had paid one cent had actually been worth a dollar sixty-sevenapiece. Eaton was especially put out because the incumbent Secretary ofthe Treasury, and thus the boss of the I.R.S., was George M. Humphrey,a fellow-Clevelander. The case dragged on through the tax courts for acouple of years before Eaton was adjudged the winner—a verdict thatprompted Fortune to describe him as “a living refutation of that oldAmerican saying 'You can't win 'em all.’ “Eaton was able to reciprocate for Truman's earlier intercession whenthe Missourian campaigned for the Presidency in 1948. Just beforeElection Day, Eaton was visited at the Biltmore Hotel—where heusually puts up while in New York—by the president of a railroadbrotherhood. The caller said that President Truman was planning totravel by train from New York to St. Louis for his last big voters’ rally,that the New York Central wouldn't let the train depart unless it got fivethousand dollars, and that the Democrats had run out of cash. Eatonpaid for the train.During the Second World War, Eaton had embarked on acollaborative venture with still another non-Establishment man, theCalifornia industrialist Henry J. Kaiser. Along with Joseph W. Frazer,Kaiser wanted to break into the postwar automobile market, and for thathe would need steel. Through Otis & Company, Eaton underwrote a saleof stock in the Portsmouth Steel Corporation, whose output wassupposed to go largely into Kaiser-Frazer cars. In 1947, another equityfinancing seemed desirable—this one to sell Kaiser-Frazer stock.Arriving at Kaiser's office to discuss the terms, Eaton folded his handstogether, much in the manner of a Baptist at prayer, and said, “Henry,we want to be very careful in this matter, because it is a very bitterexperience to lose other people's money.” The Californian seemed48somewhat taken aback when it turned out a few minutes later that Eatonwas assigning himself more than the conventional underwriter'spercentage for floating the stock issue. Afterward, Eaton, his handsagain piously folded, said, “Dear me, I'm afraid Henry Kaiser must thinkI'm a bit of a bandit.” Kaiser did indeed come to think so. In 1948, whenhe expected Otis & Company to sell almost four million dollars' worthof the new company's stock, Otis suddenly pulled out of the deal,explaining that the securities market had turned sour and that the issuecould not succeed. Kaiser believed that Eaton had welshed unreasonablyon a firm commitment, and for the next few years their disagreementoccupied the time of numerous judges and lawyers. (Abe Fortas was oneof Eaton's attorneys.) In 1951, a federal court found against Otis andordered it to pay Kaiser-Frazer more than three million dollars—this at atime, embarrassingly, when the Eaton firm's total assets were a milliondollars shy of that figure. But Eaton continued to refute the you-can'twin-'em-all adage: the following year, a higher court reversed thejudgment.LONG before the Second World War, Eaton had got himself involvedin domestic American politics. In his business life, he scarcelyever dealt with anyone who wasn't a Republican, but, in his iconoclasticfashion, he personally tended to gravitate toward Democrats. He hadfirst met Franklin Roosevelt in 1920, during Roosevelt's unsuccessfulcandidacy as the Vice-Presidential running mate of Ohio's GovernorJames M. Cox. After becoming President, Roosevelt hoped to develop,in conjunction with Canada, a St. Lawrence Seaway. He asked Eaton tostop by and talk over the project. For Eaton, it was a familiar subject. Hehad once hoped to build a seaway privately, but had been forestalled byGovernor Al Smith of New York, who told him that any suchundertaking would have to be carried out by federal, state, and49provincial governments, and not by any individuals for their own profit.Roosevelt told Eaton that he was being hindered by a provincialgovernment—specifically, that of Mitchell Hepburn, the Premier ofOntario. “Inasmuch as Mitch Hepburn was a cousin of mine and also afanner who raised cattle, Roosevelt asked me to persuade him to goalong with the scheme,” Eaton says. “I said I'd be glad to, but I wouldneed full and official information on how negotiations stood. ThePresident said that was easy, and made a date for me to go see Secretaryof State Cordell Hull. I did, and learned what I wanted, but a weeklater I received a letter from Hull to the effect that his department, onreviewing the whole matter, had concluded that all negotiations shouldhe carried on not by private citizens but exclusively by governmentofficials. I sent a note to Roosevelt saying that I assumed he didn't wantme to continue. He replied that Hull was, of course, absolutely correct,that official undertakings had to be handled through official channels,but—I don't know what, if anything, he told Hull—wouldn't I pleaseproceed as planned? So I went and spent a weekend with Hepburn on hisfarm, and we talked about cattle breeding and various agriculturalmatters, and I finally got around to the question of his supportingRoosevelt on the St. Lawrence. Hepburn said, “I’ll go along. You're theonly man in the world for whom I'd change my stand.” And everythingmoved forward from that moment on.”Eaton tends to consider almost as consequential his participation inanother turn of events, in 1940, shortly after the fall of France. He was inNova Scotia, and was invited to lunch, aboard the flagship of a Britishbattle squadron at Halifax, by Rear Admiral S. S. Bonham-Carter, theranking naval officer in the harbor. “The Admiral served a first-ratelunch, with excellent wines, but he was naturally distressed about whathad happened on the other side of the Atlantic,” Eaton says. “I told him50at one point that there appeared to be little chance of success for hiscountry, and that perhaps the prudent thing for Britain to do would be tomake peace swiftly on the best possible terms. Bonham-Carterdisagreed. “If we could get the use of some of your old destroyers, wecould win this war,” he said. After lunch, we had a confidential chat andhe asked me to help obtain the destroyers. I said that I would, try—thatmy Uncle Charles was a man of some influence in Washington, and thatI was sure his heart was with England. I went straight to Washington andtold Uncle Charles what the Admiral had said, and Uncle Charles wentstraight to Roosevelt, and the President told him, ‘I’ll provide the shipsif I can get it by you Republicans in Congress.' Uncle Charles said, ‘Iwill deliver the Republicans if you will take the lead.' Well, thedestroyer deal went through, (of course, and I suppose my helping to Ibring it about may have been the most (important event of my life.”Eaton enthusiastically backed President Roosevelt when he ran for athird term, in 1940—even composing a pamphlet, “The Third Term‘Tradition’” in which he observed that Walpole had been the PrimeMinister of England for twenty-one years and the younger Pitt fortwenty, and that for forty-nine of the seventy-three years Canada hadhad its own government a mere three men had held the reins.Moreover, Eaton didn't like Wendell Willkie, who had been counsel forsome of his bitterest enemies in some of his bitterest fights in the publicutilities arena. The Republican who most frequently got Eaton's hacklesup, though, was the one often known as “Mr. Republican”—his fellow-Ohioan Robert A. Taft. In the fall of 1941, when Taft, a redoubtablenoninterventionist, opposed Roosevelt's attempt to have the NeutralityAct revised, Eaton wrote him a letter saying that his stand was“distressing to your Ohio constituents,” and continuing, “Republicansenators and congressmen owe it to the nation to desist from demagogic51appeals to human weakness and human folly, which give only Hitlercause to be enchanted.” Eaton and Taft had tangled a couple of yearsearlier over the underwriting of a twelve-million-dollar bond issue forthe Cincinnati Union Terminal. Eaton had, as usual, wanted competitivebidding, and Taft, the chairman of the terminal's finance committee,resented Eaton's rocking that particular boat. And in 1952, when the Taftfamily disclosed its intention of buying the Cincinnati Enquirer, whichthe paper's employees had hoped to buy themselves, Eaton delightedlylent the employees the seven million six hundred thousand dollars theyrequired.In 1950, during Taft's senatorial reelection campaign, Eatoncontributed thirty-five thousand dollars to his Democratic opponent,Joseph Ferguson. Inasmuch as five thousand dollars was supposed to bethe maximum any individual could give, a Senate subcommitteeinquiring into campaign expenditures subsequently asked Eaton for anexplanation. At first, he begged off appearing, on the excuse that he hadbursitis, hut he finally showed up in Washington and said that he hadn'texactly given all the money himself. Some was his son's, and some camefrom Otis & Company employees, whom he had later reimbursed,though he didn't seem to be able to lay his hand on any of the relevantcancelled checks. In any event, he told the Senate subcommittee, “I feltthat my place was on the side of the laboring man—in my own interestsas a capitalist.” The committee let the matter rest there. To identifyhimself with labor was one of Eaton's favorite pastimes. He more thanonce proposed, to the outrage of many of his fellow-capitalists, that itwould he an estimable notion for employees to sit on the boards ofcorporations for which they toiled. In 1947, he had written, “The casualnesswith which we capitalists seem willing—nay, even eager—to invitethe collapse of our economic system, in almost every industrial dispute,52for the sole purpose of thwarting labor, is utterly incomprehensible.”These sentiments—utterly incomprehensible to many of the men who sataround boardroom tables with Eaton—were expressed in an article in theUniversity of Chicago Law Review. When it was republished in Labor, ajournal put out by fifteen railroad unions, its editors stated, “So far asLabor can recall, nothing quite like it has appeared in print in recentyears.”The funds that didn't help Ferguson defeat Taft were contributedby Eaton through Labor's Non-Partisan League, an entity created byJohn L. Lewis. It was perhaps natural that the mine worker’s leader,considered by many of his fellow-unionists the most cantankerousspecimen of their breed, should have been a warm friend of CyrusEaton, who enjoyed much the same reputation on his side of theindustrial fence. When, during the Second World War, there was angrytalk of drafting miners who were dissatisfied with their workingconditions, Eaton rushed to Washington at President Roosevelt's behestand assisted in achieving peace between Lewis and the mine owners.“John Lewis has again proved that he is a brilliant leader,” Eatondeclared after that war within a war had ended. “I wish Americanindustry and government had more men of his courage andstatesmanship.” Eaton says that he and Lewis, who died in 1969, ateighty-nine, had a lot in common. Lewis's mother-in-law was an Eaton,for one thing, and, for another, both men were fond of poetry. “John andI liked to talk about the great authors and philosophers and scientists ofthe world,” Eaton says. “I was an admirer of Darwin and Huxley andTyndall and their views of the origin of man and of his destiny, and wediscussed these matters a great deal. It didn't bother Lewis to be knownas my friend any more than it bothered me to be known as his.” Oneaspect of their friendship was explored in an article in the December,531961, issue of Harper's, which recounted in considerable detail how, adecade earlier, the United Mine Workers had lent perhaps ten milliondollars to various Eaton companies, thus enabling Eaton to procurecontrol of the West Kentucky Coal Company, which, theretofore neverorganized, soon recognized Lewis's union.FROM his involvement in American politics it was an easy enoughstep for Eaton to move on to the international scene. This he did,initially, by sponsoring the Pugwash scientific conferences, which since1957 have been moved from Nova Scotia to many other places. Hisobjective, as he put it once, was to afford intellectuals a chance to ''relaxtogether, exchange views, sharpen their own thinking, and designformulas for us to live by in this brand-new world.” Perhaps the mostrewarding conference, in Eaton's estimation, was an early one, held inAustria in 1958. It was sponsored by the Austrian government, dreweighty scientists from twenty-two nations, and met in two venues—firstKitzbuhel and then Vienna, where a crowd of fifteen thousand, includingthe President of Austria, filed into an auditorium to hear the visitingscientists thumpingly condemn nuclear weapons. During one session,Eaton, Bertrand Russell, and a distinguished European scientist were onthe agenda for a ten-minute talk apiece. The scientist led off. It is one ofEaton's favorite footnotes to the annals of Pugwash that after the HerrProfessor Doktor had held the floor for forty minutes and was showingno signs of relinquishing it Lord Russell turned to the American andwhispered loudly, “It's time to drop the bomb.”Inasmuch as Russian and Chinese scientists were among thoseinvited to Pugwash Conferences, these affairs inescapably attracted theattention of outsiders. Eaton is convinced, for instance, that eventuallythe Pugwash movement was infiltrated by the Central Intelligence54Agency. A few of the hundred thousand-odd shareholders of theChesapeake & Ohio Railway from time to time got interested in theirchairman's hobnobbing with all those erudite foreigners, not to mentionthe heads of Communist governments, and expressed some misgivingsabout his behavior, but his staff did some checking and was relieved tofind that the writers of the angriest letters generally turned out to own atrifling number of shares. Nobody ever tried to calculate the possibleeffect on C. & O. stock prices of any of the irrepressible chairman'sextra-business pronouncements. In any event, Eaton usually managed toappease his C. & O, flock at their annual gatherings by exerting hisconsiderable Old World charm and by, on one occasion, reminding hisauditors that George Washington had been the first president of thecompany that became their railroad, and so they were all part of a finecontinuing American capitalistic tradition. In private, he was sometimesless than totally convinced of the sanctity of American capitalism. Hewas all for it, certainly, but no one knew better than he did theimperfections and inequities of the system. He had in his time exploitedthese to his huge profit, and he had also been monumentally undone bythem. Thus, he saw no reason that an alternative system, even aCommunist one, should not coexist with this one. He believed thatAmerican businessmen were foolish to be obsessed with Russia at thevery time when Russians, in their approach to commerce, seemed to beacting more and more like American businessmen. That there wasruthlessness inherent in the Communist way of doing things was to himnot particularly significant; as a capitalist, he had, when necessary, beenas ruthless as anybody who ever foreclosed a mortgage. Yet it appearedthat he was denounced as a turncoat every time he tried to aver thatalthough he was for the one system he did not mind if others were forthe other. It was therefore not surprising that he greatly relished the trips55he began making to Eastern Europe and other Communist regions in1958; in those oases, nobody ever said anything nasty about him.In his tilts with the conventional, Eaton found, during his earlyseventies, an articulate helpmeet. She was Anne Kinder Jones, aCleveland divorcee who had helped him entertain his thinkers at the1957 gathering in Pugwash, and who contributed to the old Eaton familyhome there”, which the newspapers had begun calling Thinkers' Lodge,a welcome sign that read “Retain your hope, all ye who enter here.”Eaton had not remarried after his 1934 divorce. His ex-wife died in thespring of 1956, and that December he married Anne Jones. SomeCleveland eyebrows shot up. The bride had an impeccable socialbackground—debut at the 1940 Cleveland Assembly Ball, HathawayBrown School, Vassar College. Her father, Walter T Kinder, was a muchrespected probate judge in Cleveland, and had been a senior partner inone of the city's most distinguished law firms, Jones, Day, Reavis &Pogue, with which her first husband was also associated. But she wasten years younger than Eaton's oldest daughter, and she had beenconfined to a wheelchair since being stricken with polio, in 1946. Eatondid not care what anyone in Cleveland thought about his private life orany other aspect of his life, and the newlyweds were cheered bycongratulatory messages from farther afield—from Harry S. Truman,John L. Lewis, Julian Huxley, and a group of scientists whose jointtelegram made them sound like the most splendidly named law firm ofall time: Russell, Powell, Rabinowitch, Rotblat, Skobeltsyn, and Szilard.Anne Eaton, who had been teaching an adult-education course insemantics at Cleveland College, had never been known as a politicalactivist, but she quickly came to share her husband's feelings about theskewed state of the world. Over the last twenty years, indeed, she hasseemed to some of her friends to have become even more militant than56he, and she has vigorously defended him against all comers. One anti-Eaton comment in the Cleveland Plain Dealer elicited from her the tartrejoinder “Cyrus Eaton has been the first spokesman for millions whoshare his concern. Until more of them are quoted on your editorial page,I am proud to hold his coat.” On her own, she became a forthrightparticipant in the deliberations and demonstrations of groups like theWomen's International League for Peace and Freedom and WomenStrike for Peace. Because of her wheelchair, let alone her husband'scelebrity, whenever she joined a protest rally outside the White House orthe United Nations she was a prime target for photographers. When shewent back to Vassar for her twenty-fifth reunion, in 1969, she took withher a scolding message about Vietnam for her classmates to send toPresident Nixon.Mrs. Eaton has accompanied her husband on most of his trips toMoscow, Prague, Sofia, Budapest, Warsaw, East Berlin, Bucharest,Havana, and Hanoi, in all of which they have received V.I.P. treatment.More than usual courtesies have also been extended by the Communistworld to other members of Eaton's clan; a stepson-in-law, Alfred Heller,has conducted symphony orchestras all over the Soviet Union. WhenEaton visited Moscow in December 1960, for two days running Pravdaput his picture on its front page—an unprecedented accolade for aprivate citizen from the imperialistic West. He has had such ready accessto top Soviet officials that when Adlai Stevenson was representing theUnited States at the U.N. he would invite Eaton to have lunch with himas soon as Eaton got back from Russia, to ascertain what was on theRussians' minds at the moment. “Adlai thought the Russians werefranker with me than with any other American,” Eaton says. In June,1965, shortly before Stevenson's death, Eaton briefed him on the reactionof the Soviet Union and its allies—not surprisingly, a negative57reaction—to the American bombing of North Vietnam. Stevensonreplied that there was little likelihood of the Johnson Administration'sdiminishing its military buildup in Indo-China, and a few days later,addressing the Economic Club of Detroit, Eaton said, “I must tell youwith sadness that my life is a failure.... In my sober judgment, we are onthe brink of catastrophe, and unless some miracle occurs in the nextmonth, I fear that mankind is doomed.” He had seen Premier Kosygin atthe Kremlin, he said, and he went on, “The deep significance of hisremarks was that the United States had declared war on the SovietUnion, that the Soviet Union was compelled to meet the challenge andwould do so in cooperation with the armies of Vietnam and China....There is nothing left for them to do but to go in with everything theyhave. I want you to take it from me that I'm certain they will.... Nothing Icould say to him would suggest further patience, waiting andforbearance.... The people of the Soviet Union and their leadersearnestly hope that at the last minute the business interests of the UnitedStates will persuade the President to take whatever steps are necessary toavoid the catastrophe that our present actions in Vietnam threaten.”When the State Department suggested that perhaps these views wereEaton's rather than Kosygin's, Eaton defensively made public a transcriptof some notes his wife had scribbled at the Kremlin.Eaton has sometimes regarded himself as an ambassador between twoopposing worlds—though, as Senator Barry Goldwater once grufflynoted, one manifestly without portfolio—and whenever he drops in at aforeign capital he makes a point of calling on the bona-fide Americanenvoy and, if time permits, on the Canadian, British, French, Soviet,Vietnamese, and Chinese Ambassadors, too. One of his few frustrationsis that he has never been to China; even from afar, though, he oncedeclared that Mao Tse-tung “has been able to analyze our financial58problems with deeper insight than a long line of American Secretaries ofthe Treasury.” The breach between China and Russia has distressedEaton. For one thing, it robbed him for a while of his customary niche inPravda. “When I was in Moscow in 1965,” he says, “I was told, 'If yourname and picture are displayed on the front page, as in the past, it maysuggest undue devotion to American capitalists, and it could bemisunderstood in China. We hope that you, as an old friend, won't take itamiss if we leave you off All the conferences that are planned for youwill go on as scheduled, but nothing will be reported in the Sovietpress.'“It has been Eaton's feeling all along that effective coexistencebetween the Communist and capitalist worlds could be attained mosteasily by increasing commerce between them. The more trade, the lesstension is his credo. He had been a proponent of doing business with theRussians years before many Americans could even bring themselves tocontemplate that possibility, and he is fond of citing an encounter he hadwith President Nixon in June, 1973, in the course of a White Housereception for Leonid Brezhnev. “With an arm around each of us,” Eatonsays, “Nixon told Mr. Brezhnev, 'For more than twenty years now, Mr.Eaton has been a leading advocate in this country of trade with yours, abelief that I have belatedly come around to myself.’ Mr. Brezhnevlaughed and agreed, adding that it made him extremely happy that myefforts had finally been vindicated.”Curiously, Eaton—aside from swapping gifts with Khrushchev—hasnever traded extensively with Russia himself, although his older son andnamesake helped nave the way for a multibillion-dollar Soviet-Americannatural-gas project that Armand Hammer and his Occidental PetroleumCorporation disclosed in July 1972. Anticipating that announcement,59Eaton told a C. & O. shareholders' meeting three months earlier, “It willbe a memorable day in my life when the New York Daily News, ournewspaper of largest circulation and the most vigorous denouncer ofCommunism, uses power produced by Soviet natural gas to run itspresses I will also be delighted when the Cold Warriors of Washingtoncook their breakfast by natural gas brought in from the Soviet Union.”Cyrus Eaton, Jr., runs a company called Tower International (hisheadquarters, like his father's, are in Cleveland's Terminal Tower),which since 1960 has specialized in doing business—building hotels,making movies, random imports and exports—with Eastern Europe.That the head of Tower International bears a name almost as well knownthere as Charlie Chaplin's hasn't hurt.Cyrus Eaton, Sr., was in his eighties when the Vietnam war began toescalate, but this did not deter him from expending much of his stillenormous energy in trying to bring that tragedy to an end He liked to tellpeople he had a sound capitalistic reason—he had business interests inIndo-China. That was stretching the point a little, however he wasapparently alluding to the acquisition of rubber by the tire industry, withwhich he hadn't been associated for thirty or forty years. He also liked tocite as special allies in his crusade two illustrious military men of hisacquaintance—General Eisenhower and Field Marshal Montgomery.“Ike and Monty were the greatest soldiers of their time, and they bothtold me it was madness to send American troops in Vietnam andCambodia, because we couldn't possibly win.” Eaton says. “Eisenhowerexplained to me in some detail that while North Vietnam was a smallnation, it had as allies the Chinese, with the largest standing army onearth, and the Russians, with the most sophisticated military equipment,Montgomery told me that, to a military man, going into Vietnam was anabsolute absurdity, and that anyone who was an Army officer should60resign rather than take part, because there was no chance of success” Isuggested to Monty in June, 1966, after we spent a day together at hiscountry place in England, that he come over and talk President Johnsoninto getting out of Vietnam, but we were never able to work it out.I also made public a letter Monty wrote me in 1970 in which he said,'President Nixon is, of course, totally unfit to be Commander-in-Chief ofthe armed forces of the U.S.A. His knowledge of the conduct of war isnil’ There was an avalanche of criticism against Monty for that. Ike,unfortunately, never came out publicly; there was too much fanaticismin Washington. But he did tell me privately once, after his retirement,that one of his problems as President had been to restrain Nixon andDulles, who were forever urging the dispatch of American troops toevery continent to destroy Communism by force.”Unable to get others to stop the war, Eaton characteristically decidedto act himself. He had met emissaries of both the North Vietnamese andthe Vietcong while making his ambassadorial rounds in Paris, Moscow,and elsewhere. In late November of 1969, he set out for Hanoi, withinterim stops in Paris, Moscow, Teheran, Karachi, Rangoon, PhnomPenh, and Vientiane, He was eighty-five years old. In Cambodia, Eatonand his wife were joined by one of his grandchildren. Fox Butterfield.As a Far East correspondent of the New York Times, Butterfield couldnot easily gain admittance to Hanoi; as Cyrus Eaton's grandson, hefound it a cinch. During eight days there, Eaton talked with, amongothers, Pham Van Dong and Le Due Tho, the principal NorthVietnamese spokesmen. “President Nixon was saying at that time thatNorth Vietnam wouldn't negotiate,” Eaton says, “so I asked Pham togive me the terms upon which it would He said it wouldn't do any good,because Nixon wouldn't make peace. I pressed him. I said, 'Give me the61terms, and let me see what I can do,' and he did. I also asked if he wouldbe willing to meet Nixon in person. To go anywhere in the world to talkto him at any time,' he said. The terms I brought back were virtuallyidentical to those that were accepted four years later. When I returned tothe States, I got in touch with the White House, and was told to report toSecretary of State William Rogers. He told me that he didn't believe Icould give him any insights into North Vietnamese thinking that hedidn't already have. 'We've decided that the only thing they respond to isforce,' he said, 'and that's what we're going to give them, and plenty ofit.' When I got to see Nixon not long after that, I told him that the headof the government of North Vietnam would meet him anywhere,anytime, and he said he'd have to think about it. Then he launched somenew attacks. It was a great deception on the American people.” InCleveland, Eaton told a press conference that the North Vietnamese hadassured him they didn't want to take over South Vietnam. He alsomentioned, no doubt enviously, that on his way to Asia he had met aSoviet shepherd who was a hundred and sixty years old and still rodehorseback.It pleases Eaton to travel with an entourage, and he has reached anage when having grandchildren along can be more blessing than burden.One grandson, David LeFevre, who, before he began practicing law, dida Peace Corps stint in Uruguay, is fluent in Spanish, so Eaton took himalong as interpreter when he visited Chile, in December, 1970, just afterthe election that made Salvador Allende President “I felt that it wasimportant for the United States to have good relations with all SouthAmerican countries, and here was one we certainly ought to be friendswith,” Eaton says. “I was interested, of course, in Chilean agriculture,and I wanted to be of assistance in the breeding of beef cattle there. I wasreceived with great courtesy, and Allende and I became great friends.62However, the attitude of our government representatives there towardhim was indescribably hostile.” On Christmas Day in Chile, Eatondecided to do what he does best. He gave a picnic, choosing as the site acooperative farm. He expected thirty or so guests, calculating on three orfour children per resident family, but the first family to arrive had elevenoffspring, and the second eight. Fortunately, LeFevre knew SouthAmerica and had fore handedly arranged to triple the amount of foodEaton had ordered. With Allende, as with the Russians, Eaton talkedtrade. “I said to him, 'Let's start Selling you things,'” Eaton says, “‘Thenthe politicians won’t be able to undo what we’ve put together.” TheSantiago newspaper La Nacton quoted testimonials by Eaton toAllende's strength and brilliance; the Cleveland Plain Dealer found itodd that he should have so unstintingly praised the leader of a countrythat was so busily engaged in expropriating and nationalizing publicutilities.David LeFevre also accompanied his grandfather on one of severaljourneys the old man has made to Cuba since Castro took over. Eatonsometimes says that he thinks Cuba is the most beautiful spot on earth,and he has seen much of it. He began going down there in the nineteentwenties,but he had no stomach for the Batista government; hemaintains that while trying to float a hundred-million-dollar bond issueto rehabilitate Cuba's railroads the Batista regime planned to siphon offninety-five per cent of the proceeds into its own pockets. When Castrocame to New York for a U.N. meeting in 1960—the time he moved fromthe Shelburne Hotel to the Hotel Theresa, in Harlem, because the firsthostelry took a dim view of the live chickens in his retinue—Eaton wasone of the few Americans who called on him to pay their respects.Castro was touched, and invited him to Havana, at his convenience. Itwas May 1968, before Eaton got there, but he was so affably received63that he returned seven months later on the occasion of his eighty-fifthbirthday. Castro sent a cake. While talking trade with Cubans, Eatonoffered to take some iron ore of theirs back with him and have it assayedfor commercial potential. (He carried home about fifty pounds' worth,but it turned out to be of unpromisingly low grade.) Castro gave Eatonsome rum and cigars, neither of which fit in with his austere regimen.Eaton gave Castro, who rarely wears neckties, some Chesapeake & Ohiopromotional ties, with Chessie kittens cuddling all over them Eatonalso spent his ninety-second birthday in Havana. The war in Angola wasthen going on, with Cuban troops importantly involved. Theirparticipation upset some Americans but left Eaton untroubled; in view ofthe long-standing United States practice of sending troops to Asia, hesaid, why shouldn't Cuba send some to Africa? On returning home, hewrote to the Times, “My latest visit to Cuba reinforces mv long-heldconviction that the American giant is making a grievous mistake incontinuing to bully the tiny but enterprising island just ninety miles fromour mainland.” He added that after meeting President Osvaldo Dorticosand the rest of the thirteen-man Politburo of the country, “contrary toimpressions fostered by our officialdom, there is not a rubber stampamong them,” An item about Eaton and President Dorticos that ran inGranma, the official organ of the Central Committee of the CommunistParty of Cuba, had, however, a rubber-stamp look, “Yesterdaymorning,” it went, in toto, “Osvaldo Dorticos, President of the Republicand member of the Politburo of the Party, held a long interview withCyrus Eaton, an outstanding personality in economic, industrial, andfinancial circles in the United States, whose positions and activities infavor of peace are known throughout the world During the interview,which was held in a cordial, friendly, and frank atmosphere, they had awide interchange of opinions on different aspects of the present64international situation. Mr. Eaton repeated his friendly statementstoward the Cuban people.”At almost ninety-four, Eaton travels less frequently than he used to.Indeed, in grudging deference to the increasing fragility of his bones hespent most of last winter in the Florida Keys. He soil has a good manyplans for the future, though. His son is hoping to build a big new hotel inMoscow, for the 1980 Olympics, and Cyrus, Sr., who will be going onninety-seven when the Games get under way, has already booked aroom.—E-J. Kahn, Jr.